How did these buyers learn about the house? They must know it’s under construction so shouldn’t be surprised at the condition. What would be the downside of letting them in? As long as your agent doesn’t get you all worried (which we know is your normal state of mind until escrow closes anyway), and doesn’t pressure you to accept any offer or adjust plans drastically, it’s not such a terrible idea. Do you feel you have a broad idea of total costs at this point? It sounds like most of the major construction is either done or prices understood, so hopefully you have a preliminary idea of what you’d like to sell for to make the profit you’d like.
So consider worst case and best case scenarios and work from there.
My agent sent out a ‘Coming Soon’ type of email to the agents inside her company. These agents are from the local La Mesa office and have buyers who are looking. She set a somewhat high price, just in case. She had a long conversation with the agents about the current condition, the large amount of work done for infrastructure (roof, rewiring, french drain, etc) and making sure that these agents believe their buyers can see past the construction.
Per our agent (who did a lot of new construction marketing), most buyers are clueless and can’t visualize the completed product. That said, if these are people who can see past sticks and unfinished floors, more power to them! Mr. B and I are that kind of buyers.
Finished the roof, which was a $12,000 job!! And that’s with paying the guys for moonlighting on weekends to install everything. There was a lot of fascia, plywood, eave repair and replacement. But, it looks great. Now we have to spend about 2 man days to fix a bunch of small stucco and eave issues around the house before we can start painting the exterior.
The interior is almost painted. The bedrooms have the pale grey with white trim, and I have decided that the rest of the house is just going to be a crisp white, although it doesn’t look exactly perfect with the off white fireplace. All of the ceilings are painted and the painter (who is now a full time employee on the crew) is working his way through the big rooms for wall painting.
Garage laundry and workshop are complete and the walls painted. We still have to paint out the big doors across the storage wall. One issue I have is that we had to rip the drywall off the ceiling because it was damaged and had a weird popcorn finish. I am going to leave the garage ceiling open and I hope that doesn’t deter selling the house and/or building inspection issues.
Kitchen cabinet installation has started. It should be complete by next Wednesday evening and then the countertop guy comes in for measurements.
I decided to change out the back bathroom vanity because, even though it looked OK, it was falling apart in the corners.
I still have to decide on flooring throughout the house. Budget is getting really tight. Leaning towards clean contemporary maple engineered wood floors instead of cork. Cork would be fun, but it’s rather ‘busy’ and I’m not sure buyers would appreciate the style. Need to be safe for selling the house. May go with carpet in the bedrooms to save money.
Also, need bath vanities for master (floating vanity) and hall bath (IKEA cabinets). I decided against the floating vanity link I posted because the top is faux (or maybe real) carrera marble style and it doesn’t go with the style of the bathroom.
I was hoping to do this project for about $85 - $90k. But… as always happens, infrastructure is eating up the budget. I did not realize that the roof was as bad as we thought. I had budgeted about $7,000 and it cost about $12,500. And, because we couldn’t bring the laundry room into the house we spent another $2,000 installing the old cabinets and re-plumbing the laundry area (it was really bad plumbing in there)
Another issue was filling in the master shower and replumbing the whole room.
Vaulting the A frame portion of the house was another $5,000 that was not in the original budget, but it just needed to get done. Also, building out a master closet probably added another $1,500
And… I was not going to pull permits which added another $1,500 in permit fees and associated costs plus the hassle factor of having to do everything to pure California energy building codes. That always adds another $200 to $500 in special switches and lighting requirements
SPENT TO DATE:
Demolition and Hauling $6,000
Landscape $2,750 and I really have nothing to show for this except a big trench on the side of the house and a lot of plants torn out!!! Nothing new
Kitchen $14,000 but have $1250 credit to use for other things
Bathrooms $11,000
Roof $12,500
Other (includes painting, drywall, texture, garage, doors/windows) $29,000
$75,250
ESTIMATE TO COMPLETE: $25,000
Mostly flooring, countertops, vanities, painting exterior and changing out the glass
Looking great! The hall bath tile seriously rocks! Speaking about garages… Our first house (new construction) had completely unfinished walls and ceiling in one section of the garage. We chose not to pay extra to finish it. It was great for Mr.'s wiring projects. Some houses come with garages drywalled, taped, mudded but not textured/painted. Our kiddos have a laundry room in the basement of their house with an unfinished ceiling. Makes it easy to access the kitchen plumbing above.
I think you’re right to keep the flooring unadventurous. I’ve been looking at a lot of photos of recently renovated condos in Montreal lately, and some of them have flooring choices that are just too aggressive. There was one place that had flooring so grey and stripey that the place could never be anything BUT grey. The walls one can paint, but changing the flooring is a much bigger undertaking. H’s family vacation house had cork floors. They were okay, nothing special after years. And can’t be refinished.
Used my IKEA credit to purchase some basic white flush front kitchen cabinets to configure into the hall bath. Also bought handles for hall bath and 2 different ceiling mount lights to try out.
The bath vanity was a little hard to configure because it is 94” long, but I need thinner cabinets on the left because of the tall window. So, there’s a big 36” wide shelf unit in there for linen storage
Love your cabinet solution. I am all for having linen storage in the MB! The more the better. We are repurposing our IKEA Pax for a built in like wall of storage. Going to ask a local place that refaces kitchens to make custom cherry doors for them to match the rest of the decor.
Didn’t look at the reviews. May have to reconsider. It does come with the giant mirror but i dont really like it.
My agent loves those LED mirrors but they are pricey and I havent figured out where the wiring comes from for the mirror. I’ve got two tails coming out of the wall for sconces right now
These mirrors are hard wired into the wall or can be modified to be plugged into a recessed outlet. Mr. B could easily do this (we installed 2 similar LED mirrors and one Mirror TV, the latter required running a TV cable to it, so it was a more complex operation).
I suppose these turn on with the same switch. You can probably cap one tail into a box and use the other to wire in the mirror. This is what we did in one bathroom.
