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.