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My father and I have renovated two houses. The most recent one took us about 2 years to complete, only working on the weekends and doing some small things at night during the week.
What we did included completely gutting the house of everything, and changing the layout of the rooms on the first floor. Then we replaced all of the electric and redid all of the plumbing to fit our new layout, using all new material. This took awhile considering it was only the two of us, but it was very worth it in the end.
Looking back at the before-and-after pictures I start to wonder what we were thinking when we decided to start the project.
Best of luck!
thats seems to be good task , lot of hard work ,you will show your architect skills along with lots and lots of patience...good luck
i remember my college architecture girls...those were awesome...God created them with lots of harwork and to perfection...you see them...u will continue to see them ....rotating your face till the extreme..sorry took it other way , this architect word took me away ;)
good luck once again
Renovating often means working from the roof down. Pain in the arse. Cramped spaces, jacks, sledge hammers, etc.
Give me new construction any day.
If the house is really "old falling down" it might be easier to just push it over and start fresh.
Be sure to get an independent inspection done. Too much deterioration and it could well be cheaper to start from scratch.
WBF
I think for most of the western world it is too late to make money from real estate. In the UK is gone up 200% or something in the last 10 years. I thikk in the US you guys are starting to see values decline already.
For me I want a family home and I spotted a reasonable deal on this place compared to the rest of the market. Even in Prague people ask silly money for houses that have had nothing done to them since communism fell.
Although in hindsight I wish I started as a property developer 10 years ago ;).
Anyone had experience of this? Good or bad.
Jut give yourself plenty of room for unexpected project creep.
"Honey can we just fix the toilet?" :-)
Our guest house privvy was sitting about an inch off the floor when we bought the place. No problem, I thought, house has settled, I'll crawl under there, shorten the pipe to drop it back to level, remodel the bath, we're done.
I removed all the bathroom fixtures and was looking at the mud sill and outer joist through the access hole under the bathtub head. In case you don't know, the mud sill is a 2X4 is bolted flat on the foundation and the outer 2 X 8 joist sits on its end on top of it, then comes the subfloor and floor. The bottom outer joist was angled outward and off the foundation . . . my stomach began to turn . . .
On further inspection the outer sill on all corners of the house was completely rotted out, as well as 24" - 6' of the joist ends. The weight has caused the outer joists toward the center of the house to just pop out at the bottom on an angle, dropping the entire house 6" or so. When it was all said and done, I had to raise the house 6" and replace the ends of all joists all around. Just to fix the raised toilet.
The cause? Apparently the bathtub got plugged at some point, so the owner got under there and just cut off the pipe where it went into the septic, allowing it to drain under the house. Giving the joists a nice steam bath for 30 years.
In the long run yeah, it's worth it but we asked around and it would have cost at least 20K USD to do what took me 3 months and about $1400. So unless you do the math and it's going to raise the value significantly, paying someone to do it may easily eat up any hopes you have of cutting a profit.
