When we bought our first home we did a complete overhaul to the house, but it wasn’t exactly a flip. It was never meant to be. We weren’t looking for a quick investment.

We just wanted a home that we could afford and that pretty much narrowed our search down to fixer uppers, which was fine because J is so handy and we always wanted our first house to be unique. Of course, we didn’t plan for the remodel to take 7 years, but hey life happens and we were living it!

This post is just a tiny little glimpse at some of the before and afters of our first renovation. I’ll post links to the extended version of the remodel for anyone that wants to see more, but this will be the first time I am going to share just how much we bought it for, how much we put into it, and what it sold for. Which, I hope will be inspiring for all the DIYers out there.

The Living Room

The Dining Room 

The Hallway

The Kitchen

The pictures were taken at opposite angles of the room, but you get the idea.

The Master Bedroom

The House

It was winter grass for the record

So that’s most of it other than the two other bedrooms, bathrooms, and laundry room. I don’t know if any of you like to watch “Flip or Flop” or any of those HGTV shows for that matter. I love that stuff, and so how can I not show a final tally of how this investment turned out for us financially? These are not exact numbers by the way, but they are pretty close.

We purchased the house in 2004 for $77,000

We spent a little over $35,000 on renovations. Not all at once! Remember this was a 7 year project. I also thought it would be worth mentioning that the kitchen was by far the biggest expense coming in at a total of $13,000! That includes gutting the entire room, putting up new walls, laying slate floors, getting all knew custom built cabinets, crown molding, granite counter tops, the booth, the lighting, and all new energy efficient stainless steel appliances. So it was a whopper, but it could have cost a lot more had we not done most of the grunt work ourselves.

Lastly, we put the house on the market the week of Christmas (talk about bad timing) but miraculously received an offer days later for our asking price of $139,000. How cool is that?

In the end we spent 112,000 (77,000+35,000). We sold for $139,000 giving us a $27,000 profit. Instead of paying to live somewhere we made over $3,000 a year off of our property. Not too shabby, although keep in mind most of the time we were somewhere in-between the before and after. So it wasn’t a classy situation believe me, and I can assure you that there was a ton of physical labor involved. Let’s just say we earned our keep.

Not that it’s anyones business what happened to that money, but we were able to pay off all of our debt including student loans, a car loan, medical bills, and credit cards. It has been such a blessing to be out from underneath all of that! I am really happy with the outcome of our “7 year flip” even though it’s not realistic for us to be home owners right now, I look forward to the day we can do something like this again. I say that looking at all the pretty pictures. It’s kind of like childbirth though, you forget how much effort it took!

Have you ever done any major home renovations? Would you do it again?