We are heading into the City to try to do an over the counter review for a building permit on Tuesday. This building permit is going to be tricky because I do not own the house. The owners are going to pull the permit themselves as an Owner Builder, subcontracting to a construction crew, licensed electrician, tile installers, drywall, window installation and flooring installers. I’ve been working everything through the planning and engineering process. I think we have everything ready. Originally I was hoping to have the permit approved by end of September but it was very difficult to keep the draftsman and structural engineer moving. And, of course, there was the annoying HOA approval in the fray on this one. Luckily the HOA just looked at the plans and proposed exterior color and approved at the monthly meeting. We avoided the Committee with clipboards requiring an inspection:)
Here is the scope of the project:
220 square foot addition to family room/ kitchen
Enclose upstairs bonus room into 4th bedroom
Prior owner carved out an office and full bathroom in the attic space next to the original bonus room. This is the extremely tricky part because we are trying to get this permitted (with existing support structure that was added to garage below) in order to get the sq ft legally added to the house for future sale value.
Add powder room to downstairs hallway area
New dual pane windows
Large patio sliders to exterior in expanded family room
New flooring throughout
New kitchen
The goal is to transform home from about 2100 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath house to 2600 sq ft 4 bed 3.5 bath house. House is the smallest in neighborhood so it is important to expand. Owners are empty nest and getting ready for a sale somewhere in the future. My guess is the target market will be a family wanting to move to the nice wooded area with large yard and pool, open hillside in back and good school district.
Owners are going to try to live hermetically sealed in their master bedroom while construction underway. We should have some good stories from that situation!!
Since the owner is one of our CC posters she has requested that property address be kept confidential but she says everything else is fair game in our discussions, including photos!! Her husband is wonderful with a great sense of humor (he’s going to need it) but I think he doesn’t really know about our threads on CC and he pretty much has admitted that wife and I will be making all the design decisions.
Owner has some photos of her dream kitchen and it is going to be a lot of fun. But first there will be many weeks of demo and infrastructure before we get to the fun stuff
Owners have been working for months purging and boxing up all their things out of the rooms that are going to be remodeled. It’s a lot of work. We are going to have to be creative about where the furniture and big stuff are going to be stored. Also need to set up a temporary kitchen somewhere
I hope she shares how much work was involved just getting the house ready for the remodel. I remember the young couple getting ready. I visited for a meeting the weekend before we started. I looked around and thought No Way!! But they somehow got their house cleared out in one weekend. It involved young energy, late nights and everything thrown into the garage.
I have recalculated the budget based on our final plans, and the fact that we will need to do a little bit of extra work shoring up the house in various ways because the owners will continue to live in the chaos.
$135,000 plus $6,500 for contingency
This includes project management, materials, labor. It does not include our costs incurred for drafting, engineering and permits. I’m guessing those will be around $3,500 when done
SCHEDULE is approximately 14 weeks
Budget breakdown:
Family room addition with vaulted ceiling and large 12 ft patio doors with large outdoor covered patio $46,000
Kitchen remodel, all new $35,300
New powder room $3,200
Upstairs bedroom $2,500
Upstairs office and bath addition $7,600
New flooring / stairs $12,500
New windows $5,750
Miscellaneous repairs, fixes and project management $22,150
I have every intention of saving money everywhere we can throughout the process, so I hope it comes in significantly lower than that. Or at least one can hope!
Young energy is lacking in our empty nester house! We are having a pod delivered. As hubby and I have been trying to purge/store/decide what to keep, I have kept wondering why we didn’t just move? We are going through SO MUCH STUFF, but we have lived in the house for 26 years, and are still storing 3 kids’ worth of leftovers.
The garage is tricky for storage, as some of the work will be done in that area. We will set up a kitchenette out there as well. Yes, we will be living in chaos, and I’m almost sure hubby wants to live in the back of the house b/c “it will be like camping,” and I am not a camper. This is payback time for 30 years of not camping with him…
Tomorrow I will be hanging out at the CIty with CB to hopefully get this all permitted. Let the adventure begin!
It is bad enough with ONE kid’s stuff. My H and I have a largish house with just the two of us, and it was large for 3 of us. S keeps leaving stuff from various stages of his life in his bedroom, and I keep asking him to go through it and get rid of some of it. His response: “Do you need the space?”
Well, no, obviously…
When you have a house with a LOT of space, including a huge attic, it is all too easy to just put stuff away and forget about it, until the day of reckoning comes.
Dfin’s day of reckoning has come. Imagine having to clear out your kitchen, giant bonus room, office and most of your garage? And store all the furniture somewhere. Seems easy until you have to clear out desks, bookcases, cabinets and closets! I need to do it myself but I cannot even wrap my head around how to clear out the garage.
I was joking with Dfin…if your husband wants you to camp for 3 months, you’d better get your dream kitchen out of this:)
I had to clear out my whole house, except the family room & kitchen, including every closet, when I had my hardwood floors refinished last summer. A huge PITA. I had to take everything out of my china cabinet (where I also keep all my crystal) and everything in the dining room hutch. I did toss a whole bunch of stuff in a marble topped chest of draws where I keep linen table clothes; napkins, wrapping paper/bags, etc.
When we did our kitchen and the family room addition I set up the microwave and toaster oven in the dining room and the fridge was put on the laundry room. Since all the work was being done in the back of the house it wasn’t that bad. A lot of dust though even with the plastic put up to separate the rest of the house from the new room.
I tossed my kids stuff when he was still in college and redid his room as the guest room. Everything of his still here is stored in a few big Tupperware bins in the basement where it will remain until we are dead and he throws them out.
“I was joking with Dfin…if your husband wants you to camp for 3 months, you’d better get your dream kitchen out of this:)”
You bet! That is a reasonable trade. My Mr. decided that he will singlehandedly make decisions about what to do with our swamp of a backyard aka his “chainsaw playground.” He told me that I can do anything I wish within the house, but the yard is his jurisdiction. Lol. As my grandfather used to say, “A man and his dog are for the yard, a woman and her cat are for the house.” Ukrainian proverb, I guess.
Having CB as s project manager and her trusted sources of stuff and labor is invaluable! I have been managing smaller projects in our new house that did not involve too many structural work, and it drove me crazy at times. I was on sabbatical of sorts, but still! Will be following this thread with interest. Good luck purging! We went through a round when we were moving. It is a big job.
I always do the holidays, so I’m looking at this as a "no, not me this year!’ wonderful reprieve. Hubby and I saw a bunch of decorated trees inside at Home Depot (another moving box run) and decided that we will get our holiday spirit there
CB is REALLY excited that we will be travelling for over a week during Thanksgiving. Her crew would prefer that we make ourselves scarce for the whole time (me too!)
What fun! I finally have time to pay attention to one of these threads (as respite from my own downsize house projects). But I also have interest in SD as S and D in law live there. In rental housing, thus far…
My sympathies on the clean out. I purged my big house under great pressure over 6 months.
Woooo! Let the fun begin!