This couple bought a shed and turned it into a working home

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A couple who flipped a home for a profit recently gained widespread attention online – because their home was just a shed when they first bought it. Nick and Meghan Lucido bought a shed from Home Depot for about $27,000 in 2019. After renovating it and living in it for about a year, they sold it for a profit – and used that money to build a traditional home.

They posted about their home on social media and the story went viral on TikTok. Viewers were fascinated by their shed, and how they not only turned it into a home – but turned a profit.

A few years ago, they were just two young professionals in Georgia who were “keeping up with the Joneses,” Nick said. “The story starts with us racking up some debt that we didn’t mean to get into,” he said. After having their son, they decided to save money by selling everything and moving into a camper.

They paid off $82,000 worth of debt by making that move, and were able to buy a new property and start building their dream home in the mountains of northern Georgia. But they were tired of living in the camper, so in the interim, they decided to buy and renovate a shed from Home Depot. They put the shed on the eight acres of property they had bought for their new house.

“It was just a shell,” Meghan said.

“We bought our code book, we met with the local code enforcement, we did everything that needed to be done to convert that into a home,” Nick said.

The pair had renovated their former home, and with Nick acting as general contractor, learning mainly from YouTube videos, they turned the shed into a two-story, 860-square-foot home. It has working plumbing, one bedroom and a deck.

“It was very radical and extreme but we wouldn’t have it any other way,” Nick said. They invested about $60,000 into turning the shed into a livable home.

“A home is really just a place for you to lay your head down at night and just recover and replenish yourself,” he said. “We didn’t spend a lot of time inside. When you have eight acres in the middle of the woods, you have some freedom to do what you want.”

At first, the Lucidos planned to live in the shed as they built their new home on the same property, but when the pandemic, hit they saw an opportunity to sell.

Home prices increased across the U.S., with Florida cities Miami, Orlando and Tampa seeing some of the sharpest increases. Prices in San Diego, Charlotte and Atlanta have also climbed.

“We had a lot of people tell us we should Airbnb it out,” Meghan said. “It was kind of like, ‘Let’s just list it and see what happens.’ And we got a lot of hits on it. It was like, ‘Oh, maybe people do like this.'”

During the pandemic, Americans decided to leave cities and try out more suburban or rural areas. Nearly 4 in 10 city dwellers considering moving to a more rural area because of the COVID-19 outbreak, a Harris poll found in 2020. In New York City alone, more than 333,000 people had left the five boroughs by January 2021, according to data obtained by CBS New York.

“I think it was an ideal space and with the market the way it was at the time, people were escaping Atlanta and the metro area and people wanted a little privacy and seclusion and I think that property delivered a lot,” Nick said.

Not only was the market favoring sellers, the tiny house wasn’t all that tiny. The average apartment in Atlanta is 971 square feet and in New York, the average is 702 square feet, according to Rent Cafe. Plus, the tiny home came with more than eight acres of land.

So, the couple sold it for $312,000 in April 2021, after living in it for slightly longer than a year. They made about $225,000 in profit and used the money to build their new home on another plot of land, temporarily moving into an apartment as it was under construction.

In 2021, the average home price in Cumming, Georgia, where the property was located, was $374,000, according to Zillow – this does not take into account lot size or number of bedrooms. The average cost of homes in the area has increased since then, as they have across the U.S.

Right now, the average price per square foot for homes in Cumming is $203, according to Realtor.com. When the Lucidos sold their home, they got about $362 per square foot.

“There’s so much to unpack in this story, and I think our story is not unique in the sense that people are hurting. People are burdened by debt and the everyday weight of life,” said Nick. “So, I think our debt story, how we were probably one of the very, very few to sell pretty much everything we own – including the furniture, I mean, we sold everything – I think there’s a little inspiration there that there’s light at the end of the path.”

The couple did not expect their story to go viral again this month after they first posted about the shed in 2020, but “TikTok’s algorithm picked it right back up and ran with it,” Nick said.

“It’s kind of a weird timing…but with the economic state people are in right now, it’s probably extremely appropriate for people to hear the behind the scenes story,” he said.

The only thing they regret: “We should’ve done it sooner,” Meghan said. While they’re happily moved in to their new build, the couple said they wouldn’t rule out flipping a home again.

Caitlin O’Kane