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First Fix and Flip House in Eagle, ID

I recently completed my first “fix and flip” house in Eagle, ID and thought I’d share some pretty pictures and lessons learned from this adventure! I use the term “flip” in quotes because it wasn’t your typical flip—it was more of a high-end remodel. We were trying to appeal to a high-end buyer and wanted to make sure we ended up with a high-quality product, not just putting “lipstick on a pig” like a lot of flippers do. It was important to me to have an end product I could be proud of and to provide a place I myself would want to live!

When we started on this journey, we had planned to hire a general contractor to do the work for us and handle all of the day-to-day project management. However, after we purchased the property, the contractor raised his initial bid by 75%! Ugh. We considered selling it and moving on because we just didn’t have the time to manage the project ourselves and get bids from multiple subs for all the phases. After much deliberation and changing our minds several times, we decided to take the project on ourselves. It was stressful to say the least. We were greatly helped by a strong real estate market here in the Treasure Valley.  Even though we lost time and money changing our minds so much, we still came out ahead and learned a lot! In the end our NET PROFIT on this project was $130,000! Not bad for first-timers! I have to give a lot of the credit to my awesome team of contractors! They are the superstars here, and we couldn’t have done so well on this project without them.

If you are thinking about flipping or house hacking in this market, I’d be happy to help you find an awesome property and share my list of amazing contractors! To help you more, here’s a list of some of my lessons learned so maybe you don’t have to make some of the mistakes we did:

  1. SCOPE! Figure out your scope and be 100% decided on a direction before you do ANYTHING. We changed our minds so many times we ended up having to pay to have the interior of the house completely repainted twice. That was a $5000 mistake. Save painting until last!

  2. Visit the site OFTEN! Even if you have wonderfully amazing contractors working for you, they still need guidance, otherwise they will just do things the way they want and then you lose time and money having them come back to REDO things. We probably lost around $2000 (at least) in redoing mistakes due to lack of supervision and communication. Had we been able to be more hands-on project managers, we could have avoided those things.

  3. Hire a designer! It is worth every penny to hire a designer to make all those little decisions for you so you can focus on the project as a whole (scope, schedule and budget!) It’s too time consuming to have to visit stores, browse online, and figure out what tile and grout color you want to go with your floors and cabinets. It’s just too many details to try to be the project manager, contractor, AND designer. Trust me on this one, you will be so glad you did! This made us thousands of dollars in return because of the beautiful finishes picked out and extra details that just really helped the home to stand out against the competition.

  4. MULTIPLE BIDS FOR EVERYTHING! We saved thousands by getting at least 3 bids for every step of the project. Even if you have a trusted contractor, it’s always good to make them compete for the work so that you know you are getting the best deal from them, and they don’t take the relationship for granted. With that said, the lowest price isn’t always going to save you money. We learned this lesson with our cabinets. We went with the best price for what seemed to be good quality cabinets, but in order to get them right we had to have the installer came back at least 5-6 times to fix things. We replaced one cabinet THREE TIMES before they got it right. It adds a lot of stress and wasted time when you choose a contractor solely based on being the lowest bidder. NOT worth it.

  5. Pick the RIGHT property! Not every tired or run-down house is going to be a great flip. We got really lucky by getting a house with great “bones.”  It was just a time capsule from the 70’s, but all the major things in the house had been updated and very well maintained. When we bought it, the roof was only 7 years old, water heater was new, furnace and A/C were only 5 years old, and there was nothing wrong with the foundation or siding. That saved A LOT of money not having to update any major systems in the house.

Now for the pretty pictures you’ve been waiting for!