Somewhere in between our own house renovations and selling and moving, we also flipped a house. Tony’s parents bought this bungalow in October 2013, and between the four of us we renovated it top to bottom and sold it six months later. We really enjoyed doing it and learned a lot, however that was a very busy time in our lives. Tony and I were both working full time and going to the flip house some evenings and most weekends. We also had two young kids at that time, and I got pregnant for our third child during those six months. It’s tiring enough being pregnant, but with all that was going on at that time I was running on fumes.
I forgot to take before pictures, but these are the pictures from when we sold the house. Just use your imagination and know that it looked and whole lot better when we were finished.
In the kitchen we replaced the cabinet knobs, changed the light and added a new curtain. The cabinets were fine, but we did a coat of paint on the inside to freshen it all up. There was wallpaper all over the house, including the kitchen, which had to be removed before painting the walls.
There was a wall between the kitchen and the dining room which we took down. This really helped to open up the space and update the whole layout.
We took up the linoleum that was in the kitchen and replaced it with hardwood flooring. We used the same hardwood throughout the whole upstairs of the house.
There were two layers of flooring in the living room, carpet over top of vinyl tiles. We took all that up and put in new hardwood, and tiled the front hall area with a shiny dark grey tile. There was also a small wall near the front door that we took down. There was a lot of wallpaper, so we removed that, cleaned the walls and painted everything. We also added new trim everywhere and painted it all a clean white.
Down the hall were two bedrooms on the left, and a bathroom and master bedroom on the right.
This is the first bedroom on the left. It used to be all wood panelling with wall paper over top. We ended up just dry-walling over the panelling, and painting everything.
The second bedroom had the least amount of work to do. We replaced the carpet with hardwood, painted everything, and installed new trim.
The master bedroom also had two types of flooring. The vinyl tile under the carpet was very difficult to remove, and we spent hours trying to scrape it all off. Other than the flooring, there was wallpaper to remove, and then we painted the walls and installed new trim.
The master bedroom had an ensuite bathroom. We removed the flowered wallpaper, then painted the walls. The flooring was green flowered linoleum, which we removed and replaced with a light grey tile.
The main bathroom also had a lot of wallpaper. After removing the wallpaper we painted the walls and installed the same grey floor tile that was used in the master bathroom.
The basement was totally unfinished when we bought it. My father-in-law did most of the work in the basement. He insulated everything and framed it all in and did the drywall. We finished half of the basement, painted everything, and added some dark laminate flooring. The basement felt so much brighter after it was finished.
All in all it was a good experience flipping this house. We would love to do another flip at some point in our lives, but not anytime soon. With so many little kids, it’s hard to find any extra time!
Third House
After we finished renovating the flip house, we had some time to work on our third house, a 1990s split level with a lot of orange oak.
You can also check out the To-Do list, which is a list of all the work we completed, plus links to all the finished rooms.