My mother always told me, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all…” If I followed her advice, I would stop typing now…
I’m not sure where it all went wrong…but things went really really wrong for the Mother Flippers in February. The back story: in November, we closed on a home (for which we had been in escrow since May!!!) that was supposed to be a homerun. This was the first flip home we had found on our own – we wrote a letter to an owner and formed a relationship that led to our purchasing the home when it was time for them to sell. The home was in my subdivision…ON MY STREET – which is why we wanted to have the best of the best in contractors making our vision a reality. We interviewed a few contractors and ultimately decided on a GC who was a little more expensive, but had an understanding of our vision and appeared to have the business acumen and personality to see it through! Oh, one more thing…my cousin and his precious family were purchasing the home from us – no pressure!
February found us behind schedule on a project that is on month four of a two month timeline, fighting a contractor who has failed us in every way imaginable. My cousin and his wife had closed on the home they were selling to move into our flip house – closing was set for this month – and we didn’t have floors, a kitchen at all, or any working bathrooms…this was VERY BAD. To top it off, we had three homes on the market, and had just purchased two in January. Oh, and the GC we thought was so great was refusing to fulfil our verbal contract for the scope of work – and the master bathroom tile looked like someone blindfolded themselves and played pin the tale on the donkey with mortar and subway tiles.
By the end of February, we felt defeated. The home we had such high hopes for was functional enough to for my cousin’s family to move in – but, our GC, in whom we placed all our faith, almost blew up my cousin’s family. He had not properly hooked up some gas lines he was not qualified or licensed to be touching – when we brought in our master plumber, he discovered they had been sleeping in a home that was a moment away from explosion or carbon monoxide poisoning!!! February was our crash course in chaos and heartbreak. By the end of the month, we were in a legal dispute with our GC, my cousin and his family were living in an incomplete home (all be it safe at this point), and we still had three homes on the market, two new homes that hadn’t been touched, and the GC from hell has taken a significant amount of our money for a second home in my subdivision and is refusing to work. Jesus, take the wheel…