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Flipping Houses: It’ll Put Hair On Your Chest

Danny Johnson
3 min read
Flipping Houses: It’ll Put Hair On Your Chest

I like to tell my kids that certain foods will put hair on their chest.

It’s especially funny because my kids are all girls with the exception of the baby. He will surely hear it a lot.

There was a particular house that put A LOT of hair on my chest. It also turned much of the hair on my head gray. I’ll be sharing the details of why this happened shortly.

You will encounter things that are not pleasant but will be worth it

When you flip houses, you inevitably come across situations that you’d rather not have to deal with. This is when flipping houses is not all fun and games.

These are times when things just don’t go very smoothly.

Times such as when:

  • closings don’t happen because buyers end up not being able to qualify for their loan
  • contractors disappear with your money, never to be heard from again
  • huge problems are uncovered during the rehab
  • vacant houses get vandalized

This last item is the one that caused the insane growth on my chest that the hair club for men wanted to make me a star because of.

Kids With Nothing To Do Love Vacant Houses

Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.

We had bought a bank-owned house that backed up to a road that separated two neighborhoods. This house had a pool. This house had a problem with keeping kids from destroying the fence so that they could move more quickly between the two hoods. You see, they would have had to walk a quarter mile out of their way to enter this neighborhood the proper way. Can you blame them…

That was just the beginning. I had our contractor fix the fence and ‘beef it up’ a little with some extra wood.

It appeared the youths had fun destroying these new boards. They chose those to destroy rather than breaking the remaining old and dilapidated boards that I was too cheap to have replaced. Guess it didn’t matter.

We tried a variety of things, including putting up ‘No Trespassing’, ‘Beware of Dog’, and ‘Smile, You’re on Camera’ signs. I even ended up stringing barbed wired through the trees behind the fence. It’s kinda funny thinking back about it now. Just keep imagining that it looked like the Nazi beach defenses in Normandy.

That still didn’t work.

Then the neighbors started calling. Apparently the kids were now going for night swims. It wasn’t enough to just take some leisurely swims, they wanted to jump from the roof into the pool.

WOAH! Time to pump the brakes. Now we are really talking about dealing with some liability issues if something were to happen to one of these upstanding citizens.

The pool was empty when we bought it. It also had graffiti in it. We cleaned it all up and filled the pool. I do have to admit that it was beautiful and very inviting.

Not only were they going for swims, they started get bored with that too. They then began to graffiti the house. They also began to break windows.

This was not some television show, so I didn’t find it necessary to hide out at the house. An alarm wouldn’t have been of much help because they weren’t entering it. We needed something that would keep them out without requiring me to go and do anything constantly. My time is valuable and that house was on the opposite side of town from where we lived at the time.

What Finally Worked To Keep The Vandals Away

What finally worked were booby traps inspired by the movie, ‘The Goonies’.

Just kidding. Bear traps did cross my mind.

What I did was went to a pawn shop and bought the cheapest television I could find. I then covered the windows in a bedroom and turned the tv on. I turned the volume way up and left the house.

Instead of having someone stay there, we made it look as though someone was staying there.

It worked! They decided to start walking around to get to the neighborhood. Well, either that or they found another vacant house.

Your Turn

Come on. Don’t be shy. I’d love to hear your stories of problems and how you handled them. Please share stories of what put hair on your chest while flipping houses in the comments below.
Photo: Kalexanderson

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.