Bought a house with a bad foundation and the repair bill just ate the margin I planned to live on
Picked up a 1940s bungalow in Decatur, IL for $87k in January. Foundation had some bow in the east wall, inspector flagged it as "monitor" but the seller's disclosure said nothing structural. I figured $8,000 worst case, which still kept me inside a $130k ARV with room to work. Got my structural engineer out in February and he came back with $31,000 to install helical piers along that wall and sister the floor joists above it. That's not the kind of number you absorb on top of a kitchen and two bathrooms. I had budgeted $38k total for the full renovation, which already felt tight. So now I'm sitting at $118k in the house before I touch a single cosmetic thing, and the comps in that zip have not moved past $135k in 18 months. That's $17k gross before carrying costs, realtor fees, and the two years of my life I'd be spending there. I bought it to flip it out of. At these numbers I'd clear maybe $4,000 if everything went perfectly, which it won't. I can sell it now at roughly what I paid, take the $6k loss on closing costs and move on, or I eat the foundation, do the cheapest cosmetic pass possible, live there the two years, and hope Decatur does something it hasn't done in a while. Not sure which loss is smaller.