Flip Thy House

Tile Buying Adventures at Floor & Decor

A Floor & Decor store opened in Austin not too long ago, and I’m a pretty big fan, having used them to buy almost all of the tile that went into House #2 (about 1,250 sq. ft total). They’ve got a pretty wide selection of tile and definitely put Home Depot/Lowes to shame.

I’m in the process of pretty much gutting and rebuilding our guest bathroom, and went to pick out the tile for the tub surround. I needed about 70 sq. ft of tile for the tub surround, and decided to splurge a little and get some nice travertine and fancy dancy border and decorative tile for one area of it.

The border tile was a smallish 3″x12″ mosaic piece that was $4.99 each, and the rest of the travertine was about $4/sq. ft. With some random other stuff I was getting (mortar, grout, etc.) I was guessing the total bill was going to be about $400-$450. My little rolling cart was full but not dangerously so, as it just wasn’t a ton of tile.

Now to the weird thing about our local Floor & Decor outlet, and something that has perplexed me every time I’ve been there. The first time I went was not long after they opened, and they seemed to have a ton of employees but very few customers, with like a 10 employee to 1 customer ratio. Odder than that, though, is that all of the employees were very, very young, at least college-aged and some very possibly still in high school.

And all of them are super young. Seriously. I assumed there’d be some grizzled old dude with grout on his hands there as a manager, but no, the entire workforce there (based on 6 or 7 total visits), managers and worker-bees alike, are all really young, and don’t seem to have much experience with installing tile, selling tile, etc. Fair enough, and I go there to buy stuff, not get installation help or advice, so it hasn’t been an issue.

I check out today and things seem to be going smoothly, we get all my stuff sorted and rung up, and then the very young girl tells me “Okay, sir, that’ll be $12,314.” No hesitation or question in her voice, as far as wondering how a few stacks of tile and some other random small stuff could cost that much.

And I thought for a second she was just joking around, but nay, she was dead serious. So we went over the receipt and, lo and behold, the 24 pieces of $4.99 border tile was keyed in as 2,400 pieces instead, which, umm, was the problem.

So, unfortunately, with just a few corrective keystrokes our new bathroom went back to just being a normal, fairly nice upgrade, and not a sparkling new $12,000+ luxury bathroom.

Blah Blah Patience is a Virtue Blah Blah Blah

Not a heck of a lot of news to report, as we’re still waiting to close on the refinance of House #1, which ideally needs to happen before everything is signed off on for the potential line of credit, which needs to be in place before I can get serious about pursuing any new house flip projects.

But the lender seems to think we should close in a week or two, so hopefully all those assorted balls will soon be rolling. The REO property I was eyeballing immediately went under contract, so no luck there. There’s not a lot on the MLS at the moment that looks very appealing, so I may try the route of contacting out-of-town owners of abandoned properties. Spent a few hours yesterday trolling through decent neighborhoods in town and came up with three prospects, grabbing the contact info for the owners via the county appraisal district records.

From what I can glean on assorted REI forums, there’s typically a very, very low response rate to shooting off letters to out-of-town owners in cases like that, but all it costs is a stamp and a bit of time to give it a shot, so why not.

Talked to the tenant in House #1 last week to let him know the appraisal was happening, and he wants to go month to month when the lease ends in late October, as he and his wife finally sold their house in Dallas and will soon be looking for a house to buy locally. We’ll be sorry to see him go, as you couldn’t ask for a more perfect tenant. I went inside with the appraiser and it honestly looks unoccupied and spotlessly clean as it is now. He just needed a temporary, short-term place to live, so there’s like one chair, a table, bed, couch and TV in the house, and absolutely nothing else.

Sucks to lose him as a tenant, but we’ll probably bump the rent up when he leaves, as the house rented almost immediately when we put a sign in the yard and no one balked at all at the price. If we bump it up to $900/month, with the refinance it’ll be cash-flowing about $325/month after PITI, which isn’t too bad. Can’t say this was my plan for House #1, but its far from the worst spot in the world to be in.

We’re also charging ahead with renovations and improvements at our principal residence, with the new garage 95% done, and a good chunk of the interior painting and re-arranging out of the way. We’d been using the den as an office but I finally bit the bullet and shifted all the office stuff to one of the spare bedrooms (after painting and adding crown molding/trim to the bedroom-soon-to-be-office), so that we can add French doors to the den, leading out to a new deck in the backyard.

It’s actually a little harder for me to motivate to get stuff done on our house as opposed to when working on flip projects, as there’s not the same pressing need or potential payoff, but it does feel good to get our house into shape, completely crossing off entire rooms, etc. We’ve got a pretty nice chunk of equity in the house and aren’t opposed to the idea of selling it to move to the next potential fixer-upper, so the closer we can get to it being in condition to immediately list, the better.