In: Root » Home and family » Interior decorating and repair
I recommend you always prepare a budget, no matter how small the job. It is a good failsafe to make sure you have considered all the potential expenses of a project. Even a housekeeping flip requiring little more than cleaning the house has some expenses. You will need a dumpster, for example, or you will need to rent a trailer and haul garbage to the dump.You cannot just put everything in the back of your car and leave it on your curb for your regular trash pickup. I once did a housekeeping flip for a home that used to belong to a university chemistry professor. He was quite the mad scientist, always whipping up things in his basement. When he died, his family left everything down there, afraid to touch it. Five years later, when I bought the house, strange substances still filled beakers and jars piled everywhere, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. All the potentially hazardous waste had to be specially handled. It could not be tossed into the dumpster. That added some extra expenses to an otherwise boring project. Finally, preparing a budget for small jobs does two things for you. It lets you practice on little projects to see how close you come to hitting your numbers. It also gives you credibility when you visit a lender, asking for an acquisition and rehab loan. Lenders are comforted when they know you have actually thought through a project, instead of making up the numbers. I’m pretty handy. Can I do the repair work myself? “Pretty handy” around the house is completely different from being able to do a house flip on your own with no subcontractors. I do not want to discourage you, but please start out with a small project containing a limited variety of chores. You will quickly find out that many tasks require two people for safety or logistics reasons. As my husband always tells me, “Someone has to hold the dumb end of the tape measure.” If you are going it alone, make sure you have a helper, if only to hold the ladder or call the ambulance. Think back to all your personal home improvement projects. Did they all take far longer than you thought? Were you required to make several trips to the store to buy more screws, select lumber, or rent specialized tools? Things will not be any different on a house flip. Pick those jobs for which you already have a good supply of extra small parts and fasteners and the specialized tools you are likely to need. For everything else, it is probably cheaper to hire it out and sell the house more quickly than try to do the work yourself and delay a resale.
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