Flipping a house isn’t something you do for fun. You do it to create work for yourself, to put your money to work, to make a contribution to a neighborhood and/or a local economy.

Above all, you (hope to) do it for profit. 

And there are as many little tips and tricks to maximizing profit on a flip as there are dollars to spend on it! We tried a bunch of different ones — some of which are pretty mainstream and which I’ve already talked about like:

• Hiring off Craigslist;
• MAKING SURE TO GET multiple bids when contractors are involved;
• Avoiding the profit-sucking “pre-sale!” (Or have a thicker spine than I did when making pre-sale promises!)

The purpose of this post, then, is to share a couple more easy techniques to save some coin — or avoid spending coin when you don’t really have it!

1) Home Depot or Lowes 0% credit offer.

We ate this one up. Even during times of recession, when “NOBODY” is offering loans (that’s not true, but the media would have you believe it), Home Depot and Lowes have 6- or 12-month same-as-cash specials on their credit lines.

We decided to go for a Home Depot card, and were awarded a $15,000 credit line for 0% interest for 6 months, plus 10% off our first purchase.

This worked like a charm for us. We didn’t end up buying a ton of stuff at the Depot, but when we needed odds and ends, fixtures and such, they had us covered. Tyler’s the accountant, but I’d guess we spent $2K to $3K there, and didn’t need to pony more than a couple hundred bucks in minimum payments until after we closed.

One gripe I’ll put out there, though: The Home Depot online account software and the hardcopy mailed invoices are out of synch by about 2 months. We kept getting relatively large bills long after we had a $0.00 balance, so after the project we immediately closed the account out of frustration. Get with it, Depot!

2) ReStore for matching old things, hardware, and HVAC.

That’s right, if you’re flipping a house in Bellingham, you can do worse than flip within spittin’ distance of the ReStore. Not only would that put you in one of Bellingham’s two hottest neighborhoods for flips (Columbia and the Lettered Streets) but you’ll have easy access to a mountain of good values.

We bought exact matching hinges, oak doors, loads of joist hangers, B-vent, 4″ PVC (to vent a bathroom exhaust fan) — even a vintage, chromed-out, 40-year-old jigsaw with a full set of blades for $5!!!

And really, we didn’t even buy a lot of this stuff. When you take re-useable stuff to the ReStore, they give you store credit for it. We brought them a lot of stuff, and got a lot of credit. LOVE the ReStore for flips!

3) Good Ol’ Fashioned Elbow Grease

It’s true. At the start of the project, I had visions of never touching my tools, just having our army of journeymen Ninja carpenters do everything while I sipped iced tea and thought about early retirement.

That went out the window about 1/4 way into the first day. Once a carpenter, always a carpenter.

I didn’t log it, but I’d guess I put in 150 hours of my time and elbow grease with bags on, in the trenches, sawdust flying and sweat pouring.

As I worked I cursed Tyler, cursed the guys whose work I re-did, cursed the suppliers. Yeah, I did a lot of cursing.

But at $50 an hour to replace my skill-set and speed — which is probably low — that’s $7500 we “saved.” (Part of me is still cursing, but MAN that place came out sweet!!!)

In the next and final post on this house flip series, I’ll (finally) reveal whether or not Tyler and I lost our asses, as multiple “experts” predicted… or if we actually turned a profit on this project.

To be continued…