The perils of flipping your first house....

As the year draws to close it makes us reflect on what we have accomplished for the past 12 months. My business partners and I flipped our first house in the Lexington, KY area a couple of months ago. This tall task took about 9 months of struggle and toil to take a house to market that was pretty down on its luck when we purchased it at the Fayette County master commissioner sales.

You might ask, "why would you get into this type of risky business?" This journey started in 2017 on the wind swept plains of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. I was deployed on my 3rd deployment (and actually my 4th time being in the country, but those are stories for another time) and was lucky enough to service with a senior noncommissioned officer by the name of Andy Lohmiller. Andy owns his own real estate brokerage in the tri state area of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. All around solid guy to have with you in a combat zone and successful business owner. We began talking about the housing industry and how to make money flipping homes. He gave me some great advice and encouraged me to attempt a house flip. After I returned home from Afghanistan I then approached my business partners with a plan and we went to auction to try our luck with our first house flip. We had no clue what we were getting ourselves into, to say the least.

160 Rosemont Garden was purchased at auction in December of 2017. We gave the previous owners some time to remove their items and make their way out. We offered cash for keys after 30 days. When we went to the house for agreed upon exchange we found about half of their belongs on the curb and a bent key left in the door. No previous tenants, but they did leave us the other half of their belongs still in the house. Unsure of what we would find when we entered this almost 100 year old cape cod house, we ventured in to be greeted with terrible smells and filth.

Mind you that there is only one bathroom in this home at the time of purchase. Further exploration revealed where the previous owner's used the bathroom.

The rest of the house was left in a similar fashion of disrepair and neglect by the previous owners. We left the house that night in shock and fear of the situation we had gotten ourselves into. After collecting ourselves we began the tedious task of clearing out contents of the hoarder house and began taking everything down to the studs.

The total trash and debris removed from the house totaled at four 30 yard roll off dumpsters all filled full over the lifetime of the project. After the space was cleared out we had to get the roof repaired, as it leaked profusely each time it rained. This caused a delay in the project by a month, since we started in the winter and had to wait until a dry day in early March to have a new roof put on. The previous two layers of shingles had to be removed and a whole new roof installed in order to begin the inside carpentry. In all we completed these following items to take this home to market.

1. Clean out and demo
2. New roof
3. New electric
4. New plumbing
5. Building retaining wall in the basement
6. New dry wall/plaster patching and paint for all walls
7. Install can lighting and smoke detectors
8. Install kitchen cabinetry with appliances
9. Remodel the old bathroom
10. Install new second bathroom
11. Install flooring on the first floor
12. Install carpet on the second floor
13. Tear down the front porch enclosure
14. Install hardie board siding outside
15. Remove aluminum siding
16. Paint the exterior of the house
17. All new windows installed
18. Remove a leftover 1993 Honda Civic from the driveway
19. Clearing out the backyard of a downed tree and brush

Now the last item on the list had a surprise in store for us. The backyard for this home in this part of town is quite large and the previous owners had ivy overgrown on every inch of the yard. A tree was fell due to this overgrow and it had fallen on their Wizard push lawn mover from the 1980s. It appeared that after the tree fell on their lawn mower they stopped lawn care all together. When out clearing the backyard one Monday night in the summer we stumbled across a pineapple grenade in the dirt. I gently removed it from the ground and scrapped off the dirt and was fairly certain by the weight of it that it was real. Now this is something you shouldn't try at home and is contrary to every range safety briefing I've ever had in my military career. I took the grenade into the house to show my plumber, who is a former Marine and he agreed that the situation didn't look so good. The munition was then escorted out of the house and a call made to my boss in the National Guard, who was also Lexington Police Officer. In short amount of time we had 6 squad cars at the property and were ordered off the job site so the bomb squad could do their job. The whole event even made the local news later that week.

The bomb squad removed the grenade and destroyed it later offsite. They returned with mine detector equipment to survey the rest of the property and did not find anymore munitions from that era. They also left us a souvenir of a small piece of grenade fragment.

We had found some paperwork in the upstairs of the house that led us to believe that the father of the previous owners was a WWII vet and may have buried in the backyard before we left the house to his family. Luckily when it was turned up we found it before any of the kids in the neighborhood could have got to it and thought it was a toy.

All the hard work we accomplished can be viewed on the Zillow listing for this home.

160 Rosemont Garden, Lexington KY 40503

I learned a lot on this journey, most importantly that it takes hard work to get past the finish line. It can be difficult to see the end when you take on such a large project while trying to balance a full time job and everything that life throws at you. All my life education, to include my MBA couldn't prepare me for this type of experience, but I was lucky enough to be surrounded by some good sub contractors, loan officers, realtors, hard working business partners and good friends.

If you are in need a good real estate agent in the central Kentucky area you can contact, Natalee Mason, as she was a great help with selling this home. For banking needs if you are looking for a loan the folks over a Traditional Bank are great help with these sort of projects. My sincere thanks goes out to Ryan Foster and Jarred Paull for all the help with financing the project.

My business partners and I also work on projects for others. If you find yourself in need of some help on projects or repairs then please drop me line at [email protected] and we would be more than happy to see if we can help you.