This week we have another installment of DIY or DDIY. Long-time Tom & Cindy agent and experienced home flipper Stu Burk entertains us with some stories of things that have gone wrong over the years.
Inevitably, things do go wrong when you are flipping houses, or even renovating your own home. So I’m gonna give you a few of those that are DIY’s, you’d do it yourself, and you gotta laugh at yourself for it.
Flub-up #1: Powerwashing the neighbor’s fence!
For one, I was power washing a fence here about six months ago, thought I was power washing the fence to the house. It was not. It was the neighbor’s townhouse. So now they’ve got a nice clean fence. But that was about two hours of work that I didn’t realize was on somebody else’s fence.
Flub-up #2: Another time, I ended up thinking, as I’ve told you before, make sure you turn the power off.
Well, I didn’t want to turn all the power off ’cause it was a little cold, so I thought, “Well I can just off the switches “I’d think that are for the outlets.” Instead of checking it with the little tester, I went ahead and went to work and basically got a nice little chill down my arm from that one.
Flub-up #3:
And then another one, probably the funniest one, I was taking out an attic stair. So I get up there, get it out. And guess what? I got the attic stair out, but I don’t know how to get down out of the attic. So I had to have my girlfriend go home and get the step ladder so I could get myself out of the attic at that point.
Flub-up #4
The last one, it just happened now, and that’s why we’re here to show it to you. I ended up buying three cabinets. Guess what? We even put the cabinets up. But as you’ll notice over here, this is a shaker cabinet, and this is a beveled cabinet. Guess what? We should’ve had more shaker cabinets but we didn’t. We ended up having to now switch them out. So now we gotta go back to the hardware store, get the new cabinets and switch out the front doors panels on it.
So my point is, take your time, be careful, and be patient with yourself because, yes, you will make mistakes. We all do. It’s part of the business, and you just have to realize it’s gonna happen. There’s an extra trip to Home Depot or Lowe’s or somewhere else in your distant future or whenever you may start doing a flip. So realize it and be okay with it, and just keep going, and you’ll do okay, all right?
That’s awesome, Stu. Thanks for sharing. And I have to say, there was a comedian that once said, “The greatest joys in life “come not from your own accomplishments “but from the failures of your friends.” So thanks for all that. Thanks to you all for watching our video.
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