The beat goes on

The “Phase I” renovations are well under-way. To date we have had:
- wallpaper removed
- asbestos-containing popcorn ceiling removed
- chosen our carpeting,
- found an architect and general contractor and
- booked a painter

This week is mudding and electrical week with the hopes that painting will begin on Saturday. Towards the end of next week is carpeting installation and then the week after that…. WE MOVE!!!!

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So here are some details on what we plan/hope to do next. I’ve added “hope” in there because everything we initially believed we could do with this home has changed over time. Not necessarily a bad thing – it’s to be expected of course, but now our awesome, “WOW”, dream house is now turning into a cool, “Hey, Nice!” house.
Observe the following floor plan. This roughly outlines what the home looks like today. You’ll have to pardon the architectural inaccuracies – I did this on my own. Needless to say some measurements are off, but that’s why I don’t get paid the big bucks.

We started off thinking that it would be awesome to wall-in the patio off the master bedroom and turn it into a bathroom. We wouldn’t use a patio, and the view from it is so awesome, we’d rather have it frame a gorgeous, modern bathroom whose jet tub overlooks the canyon as you sit and soak. After cost considerations, and complexities involved, we’ve now gone to thinking: bathroom should stay in it’s current spot, but we want to expand it by knocking down the walk-in closet. We’re also not walk-in-closet type people either. Built-ins are so much more practical! We would still like to get the patio framed out, but we’d like to convert that to an exercise room. Here’s what we’d like for it to turn into

The city isn’t going to make this easy on us, mind you. I paid a visit to the Planning department just to do a sanity check. Turns out we live in a Planning Division. Those of you who know what this is are probably now smiling. For those of you that don’t here’s the brief version: “it’s a pain in the ass!” Anything you want to build, even before you can submit a permit has to be approved. In some cases it can be done administratively (fill out some paperwork, write a check, wait the obligatory 2 months), but in others you have to present to the community and allow everyone to voice their opinions on your project (means more paperwork, lots of disclosures to everyone on the block, a lot more checks, and a 5 month wait). I’ll give you one guess where we fall in : That’s right – we get the commission route!!! Since our addition is on the second floor, and the book on allowing administrative review doesn’t mention anything on second floor additions, we are placed into the commission category. I understand the city. I get the rules. I’m not asking for an exception, but I would love some investigative consideration. I will happily pay for an inspector to come to the home and evaluate our plans prior to submission, just so that he sees that what we wish to do will not impact the community in any way whatsoever…. other than the few week long contractors working in the neighborhood.
In the meanwhile, we’re moving forward.

Wish us luck!

P.S. I added some photos of the house in our albums section

Why can’t anything come easy when it comes to remodeling?

I think there’s an unspoken rule out there that says that when you’re remodeling (even small bits) your budget and schedule should just go out the window because it ends up being twice what you want both in cost and time.

We finally have keys to the house! However, before we move in we want to make some basic changes – repaint, deal with acoustic ceiling and re-carpet. As it stands, those items alone will take about 1 month to complete.

Yesterday was a really rough day – I had two house-related conversations prior to 9am in the morning and they were both with news of doubling and if not tripling the expected cost for the completion of certain things as well as time.

Luckily today some things started to straighten out. We also learned one very important thing. Making all your walls smooth actually takes more time and more money that making them all textured. We just assumed that the smoothing would be easy and quick – turns out its the opposite. So for any of you good folk out there considering smoothing down all wall surfaces on a 2150 sq .ft. home, please prepare for several weeks of mudding and about $15K in penny counting. Needless to say that’s not us.

Good news though: our general contractor so far is turning out to be wonderful. Also, after resolving a little kink we’re discovering that our painter is also pretty cool. One of the goals we have of this project is to get a list of vendors we can call on whenever we need anything repaired in the future. While owning a home you know things will come up – might as well have your guys predetermined :

After all this I’m really seeing the value of taking time off of work to deal with booking and managing house modifications. The scary part? This is just to get the house ready to move in – we’re not even talking the master renovations yet.

BTW – for any doubters out there, planning a wedding is far less painful that renovating a home. I think I’d rather have my bikini area plucked by tweezers than do this again.