House Flipper is a chill simulation game that lets you do handyman jobs, clean messy houses, and decorate to your heart's content. It fills the same niche that Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Sims 4 do, in allowing you to go all out with interior decorating, as you're given empty shells of houses to flip for profit, without the downsides and risks of having to spend thousands of real-life dollars on furniture, appliances, flooring - and also without actually having to do the physical labor that comes with flipping houses.
However, House Flipper is pretty "hands-off" when it comes to the flipping part of the game. You'll get a basic rundown of how to use your tools, but once you've bought a house to flip, you're on your own. Because of this, there are a few things that may not be so obvious to a beginner player, but once you're a pro at the game you'll be using all or most of these tips and tricks to your advantage.
7 Buy Directly From The Tasks Menu
While it may not be the most stylish UI, House Flipper's diegetic UI (being a tablet that you carry around with you) is certainly a nice touch. What isn't so nice is having to navigate the store for every appliance you need to buy for a job, especially if you don’t have a great memory of where each item is located. Fortunately, House Flipper has a time-saver in place.
Instead of having to search through the store for your radiators and similar appliances, you can just click on the item directly on the task menu, and it’ll open up the store page where you can buy the item. This trick is great to save time, and can be useful for those wanting to get the “Do it ASAP” achievement, which requires completing an order in one minute or less.
6 Switch Jobs Without Penalty
House Flipper lets you take on multiple jobs at once, which is great for fans of job simulators, but doesn’t make it super obvious that you don’t have to mark a job as complete if you want to switch over to a different one. For those who are trying to get the “Perfectionist” achievement, this can be a good way to take a break from a current job without having to worry about starting it over.
So how do you switch jobs without a completion penalty? Simple, just walk out of the house you’re working in, go to the front gate and click on it. This will allow you to choose to go to any of your other active tasks or properties, or back to your office where you can pick up a new job or buy a new property to flip.
5 Speed Up Assembly
When working on fixing or changing out appliances, your next step will be highlighted, to show you the order to go in. But did you know that you can ignore this? In fact, ignoring this can actually make the job significantly easier, as is the case with fixing electrical outlets.
When you’re working on an electrical outlet and you have one of three wires highlighted, just leave that wire until last. Then, when you hook it up, you can do all the screws in one go. If you do the highlighted wire first, you’ll have to do the screws and wires one at a time, so it’s overall less tedious to just do all the wires at once and then all the screws at once. This trick can be used for other appliance assembly processes too, such as hooking up pipes to a sink or putting in screws.
4 Use Gravity To Your Advantage
Despite all the decorating freedom that House Flipper gives you, one issue that a lot of pro decorators end up running into is furniture items that don’t allow you to place stuff on them. Maybe you decided to put a cute stool in the corner of the room to place a plant on, or maybe you’re using the older stove model and want to place a kettle on it, but the game just won’t let you.
Here’s where gravity comes into play. It can be a bit tricky to line up right, but you can use stacks of books or tables to place the decor item over the piece of furniture you want it on, and then remove the book stacks or the table and let the item fall into place. Thanks for the help, laws of physics!
3 Keep A Natural Brick Look
For those who are fans of an exposed brick wall, a word of advice: do not upgrade the ‘Mason’ perk. Under the Building skill, the Mason perk seems like a good one to begin investing in, as the last upgrade offered reduces the building cost of walls by 50 percent, but consider whether the cost of losing the natural brick look is worth it.
If you upgrade the Mason perk once, it’ll make it so that all the built walls are already painted, but you’ll never be able to go back to the exposed brick that the unpainted walls have. While there are a couple of faux-brick options in the wallpaper catalog, they just can’t compare to the textured, less shiny version of the unpainted brick that freshly built walls naturally have.
2 Get Creative With Custom Pictures
House Flipper gives you the option to set custom pictures as elements that you can use for decorating, in order to add a little extra something to the houses you flip. While this isn’t necessary for the gameplay, it can be a fun way to explore different ideas and get creative with the decor, and is similar to using custom designs in Animal Crossing.
One fun trick that you can use custom pictures for is to simulate windows with an interesting view. Another way to use custom pictures is to add fake wall hangings such as calendars, mirrors, or chalkboards. You could even add in Minecraft paintings if you want to get wild and make a gaming-themed house.
1 Use Ladders To Get To High Places
One of the most frustrating things is when the minimap shows you dirt on the outside of a house that you're trying to flip, but your hose can't reach it because it's up near the roof. Getting this dirt cleared away can make the difference when it comes to which buyer gets the winning bid on the house, so for achievement hunters, it's important to know which cleanliness level each buyer prefers.
Fortunately, there's a solution to this problem that the game doesn't outright tell you. You can search for scaffolding in the store menu to get a ladder and surface for you to stand on, making reaching the roofs of houses a breeze. Scaffolding can also help when decorating interiors that have high walls, making it a useful tool to have at your disposal. If only there was a ladder as a tool given to you by default.