Do you remember the flip house next door to us? If you missed that story, you can read more about it here: A Flip House Gone Wrong (And House Flippers Gone Insane). Long story short, a flipper bought the house next door to us, and in my humble opinion, redid everything in the house using cheap materials and shoddy work, and then put the house on the market for $450,000.
I don’t even remember when the house originally went on the market after the “upgrades” (I say, trying to hold back the eyerolls), but by January of this year, the price had been marked down to $439,000.
And what was being offered for that price? Well, you can hop over to my previous post to see all of the details, and you can check out the videos I took of the kitchen on my Instagram story highlights, but suffice it to say that the kitchen is a total mess.
Here are the highlights:
- The space for the refrigerator (not pictured above) is really narrow, and there’s no water line.
- There’s another area with enough wall space for a refrigerator, but it has no outlet or water line.
- The cabinet with the space for the dishwasher was installed after the baseboards were installed, so there’s about a 1/2-inch gap between the cabinet and the wall.
- The space for the dishwasher doesn’t have any electricity or plumbing.
- The upper corner cabinets don’t have coordinating lower corner cabinets, so you have to duck under those upper cabinets to get to those end drawers. The other side has the same arrangement.
- The stove is standing all alone. There are no cabinets/countertops around it, making for a very awkward and inefficient cooking experience.
The kitchen is just ridiculous, and the fact that they started out asking $450,000 for a house with that kitchen seemed insane to me.
I’ve watched as the price has dropped little by little over the last nine months, and now the price has dropped to $325,000. That still seems crazy to me for this house…with this kitchen that needs to be completely torn out and redone…but they didn’t ask for my input.
So one day earlier this week, I was working in our master bathroom, and I glanced out the window to see two work trucks sitting in the driveway of that house. These were trucks loaded down with ladders and toolboxes (actually, one may have been a van, and the other a truck) with a company name on the side. I didn’t pay any attention to the name of the company, but they were there for several hours doing some kind of work on the house.
I wasn’t interested enough to ask any details, but I did ask if the house had sold. The guy told me it hadn’t sold, so I went about my business.
And then as I was driving by the house yesterday, I noticed some of the work they did. OH…MY…GOSH. Just when I thought the “upgrades” [huge eyeroll] on this house couldn’t get any worse, they proved me wrong.
Evidently, someone thought that the two entrances with steps leading up to them needed handrails, so now the house has a handrail outside of each entrance. I’ll start with the nicer of the two. Here’s what the handrail at the secondary entrance looks like…
What the heck is that?! But again, that’s the nicer of the two.
Here’s the new handrail at the main front entrance of the house…
I’ll remind you that this was done by “professionals” with vehicles filled with tools and official company names on the sides of their vans/trucks.
But evidently, those toolboxes didn’t contain a level or a tape measure. I mean, just look at how that thing is leaning!
If you needed a handrail for extra stability as you walk up steps, would you trust this thing?
I can’t believe that there are “professionals” out there who would do this type of work. How in the world do people like this stay in business?
It’s really unfathomable to me. I wish that I had paid more attention and at least had written down the name of the company on the side of those vehicles. These people should not be allowed to work on houses if this is the type of work they’re producing.
But in my opinion, this shoddy work is on par with the rest of the work that was done on this house. And they’re still asking $325,000 for it.
For contrast, we bought our house on the same size lot (one acre) for $80,000, and I transformed our front porch from this…
Into this…
And I’m just a self-taught DIYing homeowner. I don’t even have a big truck or van filled with lots of ladders and toolboxes, or a big business name logo on the side of my vehicle. But I do own a bubble level and a tape measure, and I take pride in my work. I wish the people making a complete mess of the house next door would start doing the same.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!
