This is not a normal post for me, but it’s been SUCH a great learning experience I just had to share it with you all! The title of this post may sound extreme…or inflated. But it’s really what we recently did in this crazy housing market. We recently sold our first home for a $108,000 profit in under 3 years! We had 72 showings in 48 hours. We had 10 offers, 8 of those offers were over asking with appraisal gaps! I’m not a real estate expert. I’m not a house flipper. BUT….I can share how we made this much off our house.
Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post, I’m just sharing my own tips since it seems to have worked!
Here’s the proof…taken off the Redfin website. We purchased our home in 2012 and sold it just last month:
We bought our home when the economy was low and the housing market was NOT booming like it is now. We found the home that had “good bones” but needed a ton of work. When we bought our home, we had put in 8 offers on other “move in ready” homes. We were first time homebuyers and needed to get out of the rental game. We were desperate. But fate had other plans for us 3 years ago…when we first walked though our house it was NOT appealing to me or my husband.
The lawn was dying, the house needed to be painted, and really gutted. They had cats and dogs that ruined every surface of the home. It smelled!
Here’s the outside of the home, it’s hard to tell but we painted, re-vamped the landscape and put in a new fence. Here’s the after:
So yes, it was dirty and a little run down, but had potential. It was also only 8 years old when we bought it! Were we ready for such a job? No, but thank goodness I have a super handy husband that can fix and build anything. Also, we were desperate to buy a home and had been looking for 5 months at the time. So we decided to make a low ball offer, and we offered 8K less then asking and the seller to pay closing costs. We figured the house had 15K in repairs it needed, so we felt this was fair. Lucky for us, they accepted…but we knew we had a HUGE job in front of us. I’m going to start with the BIGGEST project in any home and most expensive: The kitchen.
Kitchen – Before Remodel
The Kitchen is always the selling point in a home. I did a kitchen remodel on a TINY budget in the world of remodels. Downside is it did take a long time…not gonna lie. Here’s what we did:
First we painted to clean up the walls. Actually I painted 2x’s before I realized a clean color is better than bold color when it comes to a kitchen. Then we replaced the floors! This happened within a few weeks of moving in and thank god we did because we found black mold. I know that’s like a kiss of death in real estate. Thank god for Killz!
Next project was the biggest, we refinished the cabinets! Read about that refinish here. My super handy husband added knobs and door pulls to all the cabinets for under $3 each, which really helped tie it all together. We added a cheap pendant to tie together all the lighting upgrades we did in the home.
Next we replaced all the appliances for under $1,000 to stainless steel. I stalked searched on craigslist for a gently used fridge, because I did not want to drop $2,000 on a fridge I was going to leave in the home. If found gently used appliances that all looked almost new for pennies on the dollar. I splurged and bought a new stove, because those seem to always look bad used.
Then we found Airstone, sold at Lowes, as a cheap and fancy looking backslash in the kitchen! We did our entire kitchen backslash in one day for under $225! This includes the stone and supplies.
We debated getting new counters but in the end decided to keep the old ones since they were a neutral color and still in great shape.
Bam – Kitchen done on a fraction of what a regular kitchen remodel would cost.
- Cabinet refinish $150
- Knobs and Pulls $52
- New/gently appliances $995
- Pendant light and new shade for light $70
- Airstone Backsplash $225
Total Kitchen remodel cost – $1,492
(not including the floors, which we replaced throughout the whole house).
Here’s a side by side, because I’m a visual person:
Next big ticket item that really added value was refinishing the basement. Here’s the basement before we finished it:
And here it is after we finished it (same view….crazy how some walls, paint and carpet can change a room! 🙂
We added a bedroom in the basement which really increased the value. So the lesson here is, if you’re house hunting and find an unfinished basement….BUY that house and finish that basement. $$$$$$
The rest of the house we did cosmetic stuff too and decorated (thank you Pinterst) which really helped stage it well.
That list includes:
- New floors throughout including carpet and fake wood. (sticky tiles in the bathrooms REALLY looked nice for how cheap they were. $30 a room!)
- Paint inside and outside
- New fixtures in all the bathrooms including lights, handles, wall accessories
- New door knobs (out with the brass!) and light socket covers
- New baseboards throughout
- Front and backyard re-vamp
Here’s some before and after photos:
Before images of the living room from both angles:
Here’s the Master Bedroom before: (sorry for the image quality…horrible images on the old listing right?!)
And After:
We worked on a project every month to help keep the cost affordable and realistic. Is it worth buying the fixer-upper? YES. Is it a TON of work? YES! If you’re patient, handy and have kind of an eye for design, you really can make big money on real estate.
Here’s the breakdown of my tips:
- Find a home with good bones, make sure the area has the ability to grow with your home
- LEARN how to DIY!!
- Paint the walls, add decor and design to the home that will be timeless or updated.
- Give the home affordable and aesthetically pleasing facelifts! (like the kitchen!)
- Live in the home over 2 years to avoid capital gains tax.
- Watch the real estate market. Buy a home when it’s at it’s lowest, not highest point.
- SELL when you see the market gaining. We watched the market for 9 months before we decided it was time to sell.
- Learn some interior design! To stress the importance of interior design, we had a real estate agent tell us we should list the house at 30K less then we did…he did not find value in the design updates we did. We then found another agent tell us to list at 300K. We did list it at 300K but had multiple competing offers accepted one that was 10K over asking!
Besides the market increasing 10% in our area, I REALLY attribute our home selling so fast, so high, and to be in such demand to the staging and interior design that we had in the home. You don’t have to be a professional. Thanks to the age of Pinterest ANYONE with any taste and replicate rooms and make your home one that everyone wants to buy!
I’d love if you’d follow me on Pinterest to see what I’m pinning next! Good luck on YOUR Real Estate ventures! 🙂
Up next, building our next home!! (A whole new headache I never realized could be).