The Flip

As it is my morning routine to fix a hot cup of something indulgent and then sit at the computer and look at houses for sale, I stumbled upon a little foreclosed apartment right around the corner from our house. I took in the sights of this little place; the surprisingly low asking price, the cute little patio, the way you could really open up the place if you knocked out that one wall.

I showed it to Brett. "We could flip this. It just needs paint and an updated kitchen." I kept the demolition bit to myself for the moment. Brett's eyes glittered with intrigue. 

I called Dad. "Hey Dad, there's this place around the corner..." While Brett and I were still working through the very adulty idea of an unnecessary real estate purchase for the sake of making a profit, Dad called back. "I've set up a showing at 11:00. Meet you there."

Well, I guess we'll just go look at it. 

Brett's and Dad's excitement built as they wandered through. "You're right. Just a little work would have this place looking great!" That's when I mentioned my solution for the awful kitchen. "So I was thinking, if we took out this wall, we could make this whole side into an island."

As is common with both of these precious men, the initial knee-jerk reaction is that of denial, or often in Dad's case, the exclamation of "it can't be done!" But mere seconds later, they began working out the logistics, and piling their ideas on top of each others. "I think y'all should put in an offer," Dad said, "I think it's a good investment." Brett and I looked at each other. "Want me to draw up the papers?" Dad asked, as though it's a simple as buying groceries.

After talk of contracts, finances, interest rates, and a remodel cost analysis, our low-ball offer was accepted. Something like four days later, we were the proud new owners of yet another fixer-upper. 

Now, I grew up on the fringes of the Chris Union School of Renovations. He had a roller my hands at six years old, repainting a townhouse over on Crosscreek Drive. I have absorbed a surprisingly large amount of knowledge simply from listening to him bark at contractors on the other end of the phone. I know that you need to move quickly. Every day you spend working on it adds up to another month of interest payments. Dad likes to stack the contractors on top of each other, but in this case, Brett and I were mostly going to do it ourselves. I know that you will have annoying surprises along the way and that "you have to spend money to make money, baby!" 

Now, I've also been living with Brett 'the sloth' Eisenhauer. As the one with superior knowledge on this undertaking, I barked at him on day two that we weren't going to be treating this like the projects at our house. "We've got to move fast. We can't go piddle around for an hour or two each day and then come home to read. We have to treat this like a job..." and blah blah nag nag to which Brett responded graciously, and then I woke up sick the next morning and was in bed for ten days while Brett did all the work. "What was that about wasting time," he'd ask me at the end of his highly productive days.

Dad came in initially to help do some electrical work and to let us run our plans by him to make sure we weren't way off. After helping knock down the kitchen wall (men can't resist demolition), Popples politely left his little birds to renovate the nest. Off we went. Quite quickly I realized that my superior knowledge on the logistics and paperwork of this undertaking was much less important than Brett's superior knowledge on how structures, appliances, and plumbing works. Turns out he doesn't really need help from anyone with less upper body strength than he has. 

I'm the brains, but he's the brainy brawn.

So I started painting. I went into it real cocky too - on account of wielding a roller since the first grade. "I can paint this whole place in a week tops!" I declared with pride. I have since determined that there is likely a little pocket of hell where you paint an entire room white but come back the next day and can still see the purple wall through your new paint. Again and again, day after day, like that guy carrying water around in a holey jug. At least Sisyphus gets to be outside.
Painting took about four weeks but I became enraged about it somewhere around day three. "I can't do it anymore, Brett! It's like painting with milk!" 

That's when dutiful Mama stepped to help trim out the rooms. It helped as much mentally as it did literally. Also, we got to chit chat and yammer like we used to at my flower setups. 

Meanwhile Brett hit assorted snags, we took odd detours, we'd purchase things in the wrong size or finish., We found out too late the refrigerator we bought sticks out too far, but we should have tried putting it in sooner because you can't return it after 48 hours, so we had to buy a second refrigerator and find somewhere to store the first one. We've learned lots of little things about such undertakings and while I think it's an exhausting way to make a living, Brett is enlivened by it all. His problem solving brain gets to run wild and I've had a hard time getting him out of work-mode at the end of the day. "Are you thinking about PEX fittings?" I'll ask him while we eat dinner in silence. We've both been falling asleep pretty early.

As we wrapped up the project, it became a family affair again. Dad had to come troubleshoot a real plumbing conundrum and Mom clocked-in touching up doorways with the milk paint while I tiled the kitchen backsplash and Brett installed vanities, mirrors, fans, and light-fixtures. 

We kept everything white and bland (bleh!) so that it will appeal to the masses, and now we're getting the place ready to be listed and shown. What a ruckus. 

Brett wants me to find us another to flip.

For years now I have started my mornings peeking inside peoples' houses purely for thrill of it. What wild decor decisions did they make? The multi-million dollar homes for sale Downtown are usually garish and tacky, and I enjoy cackling at the pompousness of their owners. On the other end, I really love the small, old, dusty places. I redo them in my mind and make them bright, airy places with a new lease on life.  

There is something to having pulled the trigger on this little apartment flip. It suddenly all feels very possible and not that crazy, so now I find myself at my computer in the mornings, hot cup of something in one hand, scrolling through the listings with the other, while a mild sense of urgency and competition builds as I make my way to the end of the hot sheet.