In the last post, I wrote this about having buyers under contract before you finish the project:

“…do NOT give up control of your project, its design, its finishes, its colors, etc. Our decision to do so, and I’m sure Tyler would agree, was absolutely, positively……..”

That sentence trailed off, and is meant to read, “absolutely, postively… the single most expensive mistake we made during the entire project!”

It’s true. The reason being that by the time we’d finished the flip and saw first-hand how AWESOME it had come out, we realized with shocking clarity that we’d undersold it to our buyers. Probably to the tune of about $15,000.

Here we were in the midst of the project going out of our way to save $50 here and $25 there by crossing town to find a widget in a bargain bin, and yet we’d left a year’s worth of college tuition on the table by too hastily negotiating a sale.

BIG mistake.

Mistakes, though, are par for the course for newbie investors, and we knew that going in. Losing our assess or ruining our friendship or chopping off a hand… those were mistakes we weren’t signed up for. Sacrificing a fraction — albeit a big one – of our profit, but staying on a course to walk away with most of it… we may not like it, but we’d eat it and move ahead.

We (OK,  ”I”) made some other doozies, too. In my excitement to sell the house to these kids:

•  I threw in a storage shed that we’d have to build from scratch.
• I threw in the rebuild of some built in storage cabinets lining the carport, that probably wasn’t necessary.
• I threw in a 4′ tall fence along the backyard where it meets the alley. (Come on… you gotta have a fence along the alley!)
• I threw in an arbor in the front yard, that I still have to go build sometime. For free.
• I threw in probably a few other things I’ve long since fogotten, but cursed as I built them.

Standing in the midst of that broken down, stinky, worn out rat hole of a house before we’d bought it, I, ever the optimist, could see nothing but easy fixes, a gracefully smooth journey through a quick remodel, and why not add a few extra cherries on top? Heck, we’d be SWIMMING in profit and laughing all the way to the bank.

Even with mistakes factored in, flipping a house is like taking candy from a baby.

Isn’t it?

To be continued…