The MVP Flip

Me painting, Wilmer judging.

The MVP Flip was a 750-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment at The Midnight Mission’s Homelight Family Living facility. Designed for a family of up to four, with an average length of stay between 12 and 15 months, it was small but mighty—and it had quirks. There was a pony wall someone had built years earlier to carve out a semi-private room. The kitchen and bath still had the original creamy ceramic tile from the 60s. Nothing about it was new. Everything about it was real.

This was the first true test of the model.

Eight days inside the unit. That was the window.

No extensions. No rain checks.

Because a family was waiting.

This wasn’t someone’s vacation home—it was their next chapter. That meant we had to prove we could do what we said we could do: transform a space in the time we prescribed, within budget, with no room for the kind of delays that are normal in construction. There’s no luxury of a slip. If you’ve got eight days, you’ve got eight days. Mistakes, fixes, and miracles included.

And somehow, we did it.

What Worked

So many things worked.

The first that comes to mind is community.

Sierra Pacific Constructors and Apollo Painting + Wallcovering were the heartbeat of this build. They showed up ready, professional, and all in. Within ten minutes, we were a team—dancing, singing, eating lunch together in this half-finished unit for a family none of us had met yet. It was joy in motion. Everyone felt connected to the purpose.

That energy gave me confidence in the model. Watching progress every day—the walls changing color, the furniture arriving, the space taking shape—was proof that the idea could live in the real world.

What Didn’t

Then there were the moments that didn’t.

The first was the grout. Oh, the grout.

I thought I could take on regrouting the kitchen and bathroom tile myself. I watched YouTube videos. I bought the supplies. I recruited volunteers. And what we ended up with was... not it. The building was from 1965. The tile was porous. The grout didn’t cure right. It looked like something between a craft project and a crime scene. I remember staring at it thinking, Oh my god. I’ve ruined their kitchen.

I can laugh about it now, but in that moment, I was spiraling. I shelled out a couple of thousand dollars to have it fixed. Not. In. Zee. Budget.

And then came the appliances. I had ordered a refrigerator and range during a Fourth of July sale at Home Depot—feeling proud of my deal-hunting skills—only to get an email two days before delivery saying my order had been canceled because the models were out of stock. No phone call. No backup plan. Just an email.

I spent hours on the phone getting nowhere. Then I called Best Buy and landed with Karrah. She listened. She cared. She found the same models, got them scheduled for the same delivery window, and saved us. To this day, Karrah is who I call for purchases.

What It Revealed

The MVP Flip taught me how much can go right and wrong at the same time. It also revealed that our model had to stay flexible, even inside a fixed structure.

Every design would remain bespoke. That’s part of the DNA. Each Flip brings in a new design firm, a new layout, a new lens on what healing can look like. That keeps the work human. But operationally, we needed to start thinking about what could be standardized—how to onboard designers more efficiently, how to refine our project tools, how to make our pricing model adaptable to different unit types and square footage.

The lessons from this Flip are still unfolding. They come every time I take a breath.

Measuring Success

We tracked everything: budget, finish time, quality, partner satisfaction, volunteers, donors, sponsors, conversions, and how closely the finished space matched the design intent. The most important metrics—the ones tied to behavioral health outcomes—would take months to collect.

That was the quiet truth under all the noise: success would be measured in how the space lived once the family moved in.

If It Had Failed

If this Flip hadn’t worked, the organization would have been at risk. This was our proof of concept—the first physical manifestation of an idea I’d been carrying since Game Night. But interestingly, I don’t remember feeling pressure. Things went wrong, sure, but there was a calm that came from seeing it work in real time. The teams showed up. The work got done. The space transformed.

What Stayed With Me

The most meaningful lessons didn’t come until later, after the family moved in. What they shared in the months that followed would shape how we build forever.

We proved the idea could live inside real walls.

Now, we had to learn what living in it would teach us.

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