Sophie Bunch (17) has been flipping houses with her family for six years around Cedar Rapids, Marion and a few in Lisbon and Mount Vernon. Bunch and her family “work on homes that” range from 20 to 40 years old.
Bunch and her family work on many different kinds of houses from big to small. Bunch enjoys the houses closer in Mount Vernon and Lisbon because it is a short drive. Also Bunch and her family have noticed the houses in the small town tend to sell faster, which is good, so they don’t have to worry about them not selling.
Some of the older houses that she flips have some pretty disgusting things in them. People say that some people’s trash is another person’s treasure, but Bunch said, “the stuff in there is only trash and some of it is even covered in mold.” One experience Bunch remembers from last year was a two story house a couple decades old. Bunch and her family were cleaning it out to start the flip process. “The house was absolutely disgusting,” Bunch said. Both Bunch and her family thought the house was a disaster. The worst parts were the bathrooms. “The toilets and the showers looked like they haven’t been cleaned for years,” she said. It was a very dirty house, but a lot of hard work and dedication from Bunch and her family got the job done.
Her family has six houses that are in the process of fixing up, but they have finished and completed about 30 houses. Bunch does many things to the houses from painting walls to taking down walls to remodels. Depending on the condition of the house depends on how much work Bunch and her family have to put into it. They might take down walls to make rooms bigger or more open to putting up walls to divide a room or make a new room. Bunch and her family do everything to make the house look new and updated again.
Bunch likes to try and experience new things instead of just being the clean-up person. Bunch wants to learn how to put up walls and the things that go into flipping the house. Bunch’s favorite part about flipping houses is breaking down walls. “It’s fun to destroy the walls,” she said. Bunch usually takes a sledge hammer and breaks down the wall. ”It can get very noisy and crazy,” she said about breaking down the wood walls with stuff flying everywhere each time she hits the wall.
