I envy your background in kitchen and bathroom design and am sure it will be of enormous value in your ventures.

I would probably opt for a floating vinyl, either lock together or overlap stick, and buy an extra box or two for later repair use. 

-What we could have done is to just buy a house to live in so I just need to put down 3.5% (again FHA loan), rent out my first house and buy more properties with the extra cash...Hopefully we know about about mistake 3 before making it!

It simply states that for every day before the finish date the contractor quoted me, they get an extra $100.

What I mean is one needs to have extra assets to invest, in my opinion.

I usually have the woman who does our family pictures take a few extras of just me each year to see if I can use one as a headshot.

But yea I would have been proud of the work if I did what I wanted to do so I will definitely scale back and invest that extra money into a BRRRR property down the road... 

And when you say you rented the basement or you saying you turned your basement in the first home into a extra room and rented it out?

If you have or don't have contracts with your subs, you can still write up a simple agreement that states any extras will be paid cost plus a %.

Had to get outside the network contractors at extra expense.