the house we bought

We found out that the owners of the house two doors down were planning to put their long time rental property on the market in the fall. So, Alex walked down to ask them how much they were asking and if we could walk through it. They told him their price and we did our first walk through. 

Alex and I are both the type of people that take on too much. We tend to do our best in seasons of busyness. So, why not buy a house in the midst of all of our other chaos!? 

The house is 700 square feet with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a decent sized living room, small eat in kitchen and it has an attached one care garage and a full unfinished basement. All the major (expensive) updates had been done: new roof, windows, electrical, plumbing and HVAC. Not big and fancy, but definitely not a bad house for our first rental property...

We had an appraisal and inspection done and everything came back in our favor, so we went ahead with the purchase and closed on the house on July 28, 2017. 

We had every intention of buying the house to do a little work and then put it on the rental market before school started at the college in August. BUT then we started talking to one of our friends who is a contractor that buys and flips houses and he suggest that we should put a little more work into and try to flip it for a profit. 

So we ripped out the old (smelly) carpet, installed engineered hardwoods and new baseboards, had a painter come in to paint virtually every surface, shiplapped over some 1970's (ugly) paneling, re-drywalled one of the bedrooms, installed all new interior doors, took off the old aluminum awning, painted the exterior, installed a new front door and garage door, updated the landscaping and had new gutters installed. 

All of this work while still having our own house, wrangling Margo, running the office, taking over leading our youth group full time, being in a wedding and having a virus that kicked my butt for 2+ weeks that required several weeks/months of follow up blood work and then falling off the steps and breaking my foot. It was child's play...

But, we did it. We got the little white house flipped and finished and now it's the blue house.