Fliperati

Thanks to a very nice shout-out from Brownstoner, the comment section of this post about the conflict between profitable flipping and detail preservation has sprung to life.  Not surprisingly, most of the feedback emphasized the value of preserving the original character of the house and avoiding a low-quality, character-less renovation.  As someone who has lived in his share of shoddy new construction rentals built by money-hungry developers, I can assure you that I will not go down that path (think paper-thin walls, poor workmanship, every detail overlooked, bland apartment living).  I’m having a lot of fun with this project and taking pride in my work, so I will opt for the higher-quality, more original choices whenever I can.

That said, I must confess that I’ve decided to cover the majority of the plaster walls with drywall (at least I’ll be retaining the insulating qualities of the underlying plaster, right?).  This was a tough choice, but the wood paneling adhesive and years of leaky plumbing / roofing have really taken their toll on the plaster and a full restoration would take tremendous time and effort.  Even if I were to spend the time and money on fixing the plaster, I still don’t think I could ever achieve that fresh-out-of-the-renovation-oven feeling that spanking new sheetrock will give to prospective buyers.  I feel a little bad about what seems like the easier route, but at least I’m not doing a half-assed job of it (like leaving the door and window trim on during the new drywall installation so the moldings are “swallowed” by the additional layer of wallboard).  At this point I have to think about my schedule, my budget and my prospective buyers and all three seem to be pointing me toward new drywall.

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I received a detailed proposal from the second architect today (in PDF form, which I always find very convenient) and the price/terms were very reasonable, so I’m feeling good about giving up on the architect I had originally been working with.  I’m meeting with the new guy on Wednesday to get started on the plans, and although I had hoped to have plans submitted to the township by the time I closed on the property, I think I can still get the new garage approved and constructed by the end of the summer as planned. 

In other good news, a drywall guy came by today and took measurements so he could give me an estimate.  He contacted me after I posted a description of my project on one of those remodeler matchmaking sites (which I’m apparently a sucker for because I keep using them) and arrived right on time for the appointment (punctuality is a good quality in a contractor, right?).  We hit it off from the start and he seemed like a genuine, hardworking kind of guy, but you never really know what you’re getting until the job is actually done.  He took a bunch of measurements, made a lot of notes and indicated that he would e-mail me a bid on the job in a couple days.  Although I had only requested drywall work, he got excited when he saw the state of disrepair the house was in and insisted on picking my brain to see what else I plan to do to the property beyond new drywall.  I touched upon some of the other improvements I planned to make before I flip the house and he took notes and said he would like to quote me a price on these projects too, which include:

• Dividing that wacky upstairs closet
• Framing out the ceiling and installing recessed lighting in the kitchen
• Re-tiling the tub / shower area
• Installing a new sub-floor and new ceramic tile in the kitchen

He made a rough guess of $3,500 for all the drywall work but hedged by saying that was only off the top of his head and that he would need to crunch all the numbers first.  This sounded like a fair estimate to me considering that he’ll be putting new sheetrock on pretty much every wall and ceiling in the entire house.  He thought he could finish the job in about three weeks.  I’m crossing my fingers that his final estimate is good and that he is the guy to hire.  Flipping this house could be a lot less work than I thought if I end up hiring him to do all those other jobs (many of which I had contemplated taking on myself)…

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I knew that potentially unpleasant interactions with contractors, hired labor, zoning officials, etc, would be a regular part of flipping houses, so I wasn’t terribly surprised when the architect I was so excited about decided to completely disappear from the face of the earth.  Although, I am a little taken aback because I spent an hour at her office discussing the project on the day I closed on the property and she seemed pretty engaged.  The plan was that she was going to send me a formal proposal / contract for the garage the next day.  Well, after almost three weeks and many inquisitive phone calls with no word from her office, it’s pretty safe to say that she’s probably found bigger projects to work on and is dumping my little garage reconstruction. 

Fortunately, I had originally contacted multiple architects and one of them had given me his cell phone number and seemed pretty interested in the project.  I was able to reach him easily yesterday and set up an appointment for early next week to get things moving.  I’ll be done with my banking job then and I’m really looking forward to finally being able to focus on this project and successfully flip my first house.  I’m hoping to write more frequent / interesting blog posts as well…

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My first misconception about flipping houses was that the demolition stage would be easy and potentially fun. I mean, how often do you get to run willy-nilly through a house swinging a sledgehammer and knocking down walls? Could be kinda fun, right? WRONG! Contrary to my whimsical vision of this stage of the flip, the interior demolition has been an extremely arduous process. Every time you go to rip something out, you have to ask yourself: is there any wiring behind this? will this release a bunch of lead paint particles into the air? do I actually need to rip this out? how can a remove this without destroying that? can I preserve the 1928 ________ attached to what I’m ripping out?

This last question brings me to the focus of this post, which is the debate between a quick (character-less) flip and a slower, detail-oriented restoration of the property. I began to struggle with this issue when I was prepping the bedrooms for new drywall and went to remove the baseboard molding, which is secured to the wall with an outrageous number of 5-inch nails driven deep into pretty much every stud. Although none of the original moldings and trim survived prior “renovations” on the first floor, most of the original woodwork around the doors, floors and windows is still intact upstairs. This was one of the features that originally attracted me to this house because I thought that these rooms would look amazing once they were restored.

However, now that I’m actually in the thick of the demolition process and trying to get the woodwork off the walls without destroying it, I’m seriously reconsidering the wisdom of an attempt to preserve these details. It took me and my dad (in town for a weekend visit) more than fifteen minutes to remove a single (small) piece of baseboard molding from one of the bedrooms without damaging the wood. The doors and windows will be even more challenging because of their position (very close to the interior walls) and the amount of wood around each. Adding to the problem, I would need to carefully label and store each piece of trim so I know how to put everything back together after the new drywall is up. Each piece would also probably require stripping/sanding and new paint since the existing paint is flaking off. All told, the preservation of this wood would take a huge amount of effort when compared to simply ripping it off and slapping up new trim. I don’t yet have a sense of what it would cost to put up new (mid-range quality) trim, but I’m guessing it would still be less than the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to preserve the original wood.

It’s at times like these that I wish Fliperati were a little older and had a larger base of readers. If it were, I’m sure this post would ignite a vigorous debate between die-hard preservationists and passionate, $$-minded house flippers. Besides providing entertainment (similar debates on heavily-trafficked blogs always seem to degenerate into a cyclone of wild insults), I usually find such commentary exposes pros and cons on each side that I had not previously considered.

I suppose I’ll just have to be content playing devil’s advocate with myself until more people discover my blog and generate some raucous commentary.

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Not surprisingly, I’ve seen quite a few of those house flipping shows on TV over the past couple years (Flip That House, Flip This House, Property Ladder, Flip it Fast, etc).  I know that these shows are of marginal value to serious real estate investors, but I can’t help but comment on one issue that seems to trip up almost everyone who is featured on the show: material purchasing.  I know that the producers edit the hell out of them and that the story told in the half-hour or hour during which you become a part of these investors’ lives is never all-inclusive, but it always appears to me that the featured flippers don’t really expend much effort seeking out low-cost materials for their renovation projects.  Admittedly, 20 minutes of footage showing someone searching for the doorknobs on eBay probably doesn’t make for great television, but it always appears to me that the flipper simply walks into their local kitchen & bath showroom or home improvement store and spends 20 minutes choosing flooring, cabinets, countertops, etc from whatever materials happen to be available onsite.  I always cringe a little during these scenes because I feel like it would not be that difficult to get a much better deal on what they’re buying if they had spent a bit of time researching their options and doing some comparison shopping before diving into major purchases.

I realize that staying on schedule will be a major challenge over the course of each flip, but I feel like you can add thousands to your profits by taking a little extra time to make sure you don’t overpay for big ticket items such as countertops and flooring.  My (potentially unrealistic) thought for my first project is to base the décor of the kitchen and bathroom around the best deals I can find on nice countertop and flooring materials.  There are a number of area retailers that carry these materials and I’m hoping to visit the majority of them to see what bargains are available.  It’s a bit pathetic, but my current daydream is to find a big slab of granite that nobody else wants at some kitchen & bath place for next to nothing and then have that be the anchor for the design of the rest of the kitchen.

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I unexpectedly was able to take the day off last Friday and spend several hours poking around my new house.  It was a mostly a reconnaissance mission since I was somewhat short on time.  However, it was still a valuable trip since I was finally able to peel away the layers of crap (wood paneling, cheap linoleum, rotting carpet, acoustic tiles, etc) that were hiding the true bones of the property.  The results were mixed.  Well, no, that’s not true at all.  Now that I think about it, the results were all bad.  Here’s a quick summary:

• Pulling down some of the ceiling tiles in the kitchen revealed an apocalyptic mess of water damage, wires, pipes and other junk hidden just above the T-bar framework supporting the current drop ceiling.  The way I see it, I have two options here: clean everything up and frame-out a new ceiling –OR- be lazy/cheap and simply put some new, nicer looking ceiling tiles in.  There are a range of nice options for new ceiling tiles, but a real, drywalled ceiling would definitely make the kitchen shine like new.  Not sure where I’ll end up on this question.
• 95% of the walls appear to be covered with the original plasterwork.  This is salvageable in a few rooms, such as the dining room and master bedroom, but the rest of the house will need new drywall – especially in areas where prior owners had glued wood paneling directly to the wall.  My dilemma here is whether I should rip out all the plaster and lathe before I drywall or just slap new sheetrock over the existing plaster.  It seems like I may be able to simply slap up some new drywall since the existing plaster is quite even, but I want to consult with a drywaller before I decide.
• The kitchen floor is covered with 3 layers of vinyl tile and a rotten sub-floor that pretty much disintegrates upon exposure to the open air.  The original wood flooring underneath all this seems to be in decent shape where I was able to peel back the upper layers, but there’s no telling how it looks in the rest of the kitchen.  The vinyl comes up pretty easily and I had planned on putting ceramic tile in the kitchen anyway, so the floor here actually wasn’t such a terrible surprise.
• Although I’m trying to leave a lot of the carpet on until the very end of the demolition process (to protect the wood floors), I couldn’t resist tearing out a really nasty rug that that was tacked to the floor upstairs in the smallest bedroom.  This revealed a large (2 foot square?) patch of wood flooring that appears to have been burnt by a space heater or small fire of some sort.  I may be able to sand it out when they refinish the floors, but the burn may have gone too deep.
• Peeling back the carpeting on the staircase revealed attractive woodwork in very good condition.  The problem is that the carpet installers used about 40 staples per stair to affix the rug and padding to the steps (no exaggeration), which makes for a very nice finish until you rip it all up and expose a ton of ragged staples and carpet nails.  I figure the stairs can be preserved if I spend a little time each day carefully prying staples and nails out of the wood, or I could just buy, cut and install new stairs.  Not sure which would be less work.

I snapped a few pictures of the demolition progress.  Check out the gallery for some terrifying shots of the destruction required to flip this house.

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You may have noticed from the floorplans on the gallery page that two of the upstairs bedrooms share a single closet (no, this is not a result of my sloppy floorplan drawing abilities — that closet is indeed open to both bedrooms).  I assume that the majority of potential buyers would be quite turned-off by this anomaly because it totally eliminates the privacy you would expect to have in your own bedroom.  You could practically drive a truck through that opening when the doors aren’t in the way. 

My first thought was to simply put a wall up where the current clothes rod is located and divide the space into two separate closets.  Unfortunately, the existing space isn’t nearly deep enough to split the closet that way.  The windows on either side of the current closet further limit my options by preventing me from extending the depth of the existing space.  My best idea at the moment is to divide the closet in half (perpendicular to the clothes rod) and close one half off to each bedroom (pictured below).  This will separate the rooms, but the remaining closets will be very narrow and potentially scare away anyone with more than a bare-bones wardrobe.  Still trying to think of a better solution here…

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While I feel pretty good about most of the renovation plans I’ve put together so far, I’m struggling with a few issues.  Namely:

• Kitchen Cabinets: The cabinet framing, shelves and doors are all in decent condition, but I’d like to update the look of the wood and brighten the otherwise dark kitchen area by painting them white.  My dilemma here is that I’m not sure if I want to sand and paint the existing doors or just get new doors custom made.  Sanding and painting would probably be very labor intensive and take a lot of time, but it’s a fairly straightforward process and would cost very little.  New doors could be comparatively expensive and challenging to mount in the existing frames, but it would give me the chance to change the style of the cabinets and probably wouldn’t take as much time to complete.
• Kitchen/Living Room Floor Plan: There’s a nice opportunity to create an open floor plan by opening up the walls that divide the kitchen from the living room and the dining room (Wall A and Wall B on this rough floor plan), but I’m not sure if it’s worth the expense and the hassle on this project.  It seems like a waste to have a formal dining room in such a small house and I think it would really brighten the whole first floor to open up the kitchen, but I know that costs can escalate quickly when you start changing structural items.  I doubt there will be room in the budget or the schedule for this in the end, but it’s worth considering.
• Bedrooms: One of the three bedrooms in the house is quite small (9’ x 9’) and is probably better suited as a den, but I’m wondering if the house would sell faster if I combined two bedrooms to create a master suite with a walk-in closet.  The master bedroom would still be lacking its own private bathroom and I definitely don’t want to deal with that level of renovation, so it’s probably better to leave the bedrooms as they are. 

Update: See a more detailed version of the open kitchen question on apartment therapy with lots of great comments from AT’s stellar editor and thoughtful readers.

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Given that there are a couple major projects I’ll need to undertake in order to complete the renovation of my first flip house, my agent wisely suggested I contact the township building department to learn which projects would require a permit and how to go about getting one.  He even suggested seeing if I could get the department supervisor to stop by the property and take a quick walk-through with me to get on his/her good side and perhaps smooth the process.  Even as a novice I knew that it would probably be a bit of a fantasy to get a building official out to the property for sign-off on all my projects in a single visit, but I liked the idea and thought it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot.

Well, I quickly learned that the simple act of getting somebody from the township on the phone is nearly impossible, so I completely gave up on getting someone to come by the property.  Although the recorded message at the township building department states that “Your call is very important to us,” that statement must have been recorded under a different administration because it was clear to me when I called that nobody gave a rat’s ass about me and my questions, despite my stated desire to do everything “by the book.”  After a week of trying, I was finally able to get some answers regarding one of the major projects: the reconstruction of the dilapidated detached 1-car garage in the backyard.  Actually, “dilapidated” is a very generous term in this case, because the garage is literally on the brink of collapsing under its own weight.  The entire frame is rotted through and the roots of a large tree are tearing through the foundation and rear wall of the structure.  It also has a built-in skylight, courtesy of a large patch of rotted roofing that has led way to a gaping hole in the ceiling.

This is why I found it laughable when I learned that I can’t even tear down the garage without a permit, especially given the stated purpose of the permit process as a means of ensuring safe structures in the township.  Walking into this garage would be taking your life into your own hands, but the township won’t let me demolish it without their pre-approval.  Even better, if I do demolish it, I must immediately reconstruct a similar structure (after I have gotten the plans approved following the 4-6 week review process and received a permit for the new garage, of course).  Hilarious!  Maybe it will just mysteriously fall over in the night shortly after I close on the house.  You can’t force the wind to apply for a permit before blowing over a flimsy old shack.

On a less cynical note, none of this was unexpected and I knew very well when I set out to renovate this place that the permitting process would not be fun.  Also, I learned that they have a fairly liberal interpretation of “cosmetic” interior changes (not requiring permits) and that I could have a dumpster parked in my yard or driveway without a permit as long as it is not full to the brim or on the property for an extended period of time, so the news wasn’t all bad.  Now if only a wind storm could sweep through north Jersey in the next few weeks…

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Having completed a very encouraging inspection of the property, I’ve taken a few moments to jot down some of the major tasks I’d like to complete over the course of the renovation.  See a choppy list of my current plans after the link to the full posting.  Also, check out the gallery page I’ve created with a bunch of “before” pictures showing the current condition of the house.  I still have a lot to learn about web page design and the gallery section has some formatting issues, but I’m just happy to have it working.  I hope to have it cleaned up and looking a bit more professional in the next week or so. (Read the article)

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