Me, My Sister and the “6 Month Plan”!

Howdy, y’all! It’s been a while.  I feel like I’m barely keeping my nose above water where my projects are concerned. The Jack and Jill bathroom remodel is taking forever to complete and the tools and materials for that project are ALL over the place!

Normally, my projects just get overwhelming for Wes, but I’ve finally reached my threshold. Part of the reason I’m so overwhelmed is because, in addition to the projects I’ve got going on in my house and being a full time Remodeling blogger/YouTuber, I’m starting a House Flipping business with my sister!

Julie and I kinda’ live parallel lives.  We’ve both remodeled about 5 our own homes, by ourselves. We both have “only child” daughters.  Julie and I have very similar design style and are constantly doing the same thing, separately without knowing anything about the other’s project. We finish each other’s sentences and when we play charades or Taboo, people think we are cheating because we get each other’s hints with 1 word/action.  People think we are twins.  We aren’t, but I guess we look alike.  I wouldn’t know on account of my facial recognition problems.  (It’s a thing!)

What you need to know about Julie is; if I’m a badass, she is a badass on steroids.  Her biceps are ridiculous!  And she knows a LOT about fixing up old houses.

This whole idea started back in January/February/March (somewhere around there).  Madison was looking at moving into a rental closer to college.  The cost of renting a crappy little apartment or house is more than a mortgage for a crappy little house.  And I can always make a house “not so crappy”.

Even though I really didn’t have time to stop working on my house and fix up a totally different house, I started looking for a crappy little house we could buy and fix up for Madison while she’s in college.   Life is about adjusting your plans to fit the moment!

I was talking to Julie about my plan and at first she wouldn’t believe that there were any houses available for under $100K. Clearly San Diego and Knoxville have completely different real-estate markets.  I convinced her that there are (and she got on Zillow and started looking herself) and we decided to buy a house to flip into a rental — together.

We are pretty excited about how fun is is going to be to work together on a whole house!!!  We think we can flip a small, crappy house into a cute rental property in 30 days.  So Julie is going to stay with me for 30 days.  Then go home for a month and then come back and do it again…because all of the sudden this turned into a business and not a one time flip… and we’ve decided we probably need to do about 100…

Julie flew out here in May for 4 days to look for a house for us to buy because we were planning our first “30 Day Flip” to happen in June!

We looked at houses all 4 days!  We also tried to work on my bathroom together but we really didn’t have any time for that.  It turns out that finding a crappy little house that we could buy was way more difficult than we expected.

We found houses that we wanted to buy!  Everyone else wanted to buy them too so they had multiple offers before our realtor could even tell us to wipe those smiles of our faces.  🙁

We found houses with WAY more problems than we could deal with in 30 short days.

AND we walked into some scary shit!  Literally!

Pretty sure Julie was commenting on how bad we smelled after looking at the last house!  Madison was agreeing!  (Julie will HATE me for posting that one!)

We didn’t find anything before Julie went back to San Diego. Which turned out to be a REALLY good thing…because I went back to my 1000 unfinished projects.

From the moment we decided to do ONE house, all the sudden were on a train, going full steam ahead on a path to flip at least 6 houses a year — and I am not ready.

Julie literally just moved back to California and was living in a rental with her family, going stir crazy without any projects to work on.  So she was spending a lot of time each days looking for houses for me to go look at with a realtor.  To see if we should buy them.  And we were planning on buying two while she was out here.  So for the last 4 months, in addition to my stupid respiratory virus that slowed my remodeling progress for two months, I’ve had so many things pulling me away that I just haven’t been able to get anything done!  Julie is ready to dive in but I need some time, so I made a deal with her. We keep our “month on – month off” schedule and work on MY house for the rest of the year, then we start flipping houses!

Because I can NOT start working on other houses while my own house looks like this. I mean, Wes never asked me to do any of these projects.  He is being such a good sport and living through it but I don’t want him to have to endure any longer than necessary.

Even the areas that are mostly complete are full of tools and crap from the bathroom and bedroom projects.  We literally have only one room in the house that is not full of chaos; the master bedroom. That is the only reason Wes hasn’t lost his sanity.  It’s not even a nice room but it’s at least not full of crap like the rest of the house.

So Julie is going to help me on my house for the rest of the year!  It is going to be so awesome because together get things done 4 times faster than either of us doing anything alone.  The math doesn’t add up but that’s how it works.  We’re going to knock stuff OUT.

In addition to finishing projects faster, I’m going to have a partner to help take pictures and videos! It will be so much easier to share tutorials and make posts and videos for you guys without having to do it all by my lonesome. It’s really difficult to drag a cameral around with me to take pictures and video of everything I’m doing.  Especially when my hands are covered in mortar, grout, wood glue…

So it’ll be fun to work together on the house and on the blog and YouTube. We’re going to start by finishing the bathroom and bedroom project I have been working on literally this entire year.  It’s still here…and here…

and here…

The best thing is… Julie is arriving TOMORROW!  So buckle up because we’re going to be throwing down!