DIY home remodeling...

[heathergw]

Has anyone done some major remodeling to their house and have any tips or feedback? Things you wish you had known ahead of time? Problems you ran in to? Positive or negative experience? Would you do it again?


We are talking about turning our main floor (tri-level) from a kitchen, dining room, living room/school room into one big great room which means tearing down a wall except the load bearing part will become a pillar and moving the door into the garage and replacing all the flooring and the kitchen cabinets and really it will be a complete overhaul and really modernize our floor plan and make it more functional for our family.... I'm really excited about it but totally nervous at the same time!!! We went to the Habitat For Humanity Restore last night and found a ginormous set of beautiful stained maple cabinets that we are hoping will still be there on Wednesday morning that we're going to buy and make this redesign work lol... It will be so nice for entertaining and for homeschooling and just so much more functional for our needs... I'm just nervous that it's going to be so much more than we can handle work wise since we'll be doing it ourselves since we can't afford to hire someone to do it, tho we will hire for moving the door leading to the garage and replacing the kitchen window but the rest we want to do ourselves, EEK!!!

[Darcy Baldwin]

It will take twice as much time as you estimate :w00t: :blink:

[marlathrall]

I was going to ask this same question. We desperately need to redo our bathrooms and kitchen. Plus, we want to turn our garrage into a master suite. Last week, we spent over an hour looked at Lowes. It was so much fun and we are getting really excited.

I'd love some advice.

[MamaBee]

You are way more brave than I... hahaha... I'd just move. :p

Good Luck!

[LJSDesigns]

No advice at all Ladies, just wishes for patience and luck. With home remolding, it seems that you need plenty of both. :)

[nanienamou]

We've done it 2 times.

Set a budget for unexpected surprises. When renovating an older home, you always find some things that need fixing (like plumbing, electricity, etc.)

Don't sacrifice quality. Nice building materials (wood, stone, nice cabinets) always help in re-sale.

Be patient, it will take more time than you think. And have fun. :)

[BrattyMeg]

yah def double your budged time and $$..I personally would wait til you had all the funds before starting the project (although I'd def buy here and there for it) You don't want to start it, then run out of $$ and have to live in a 1/2 finished project for months before you can save more $$ and start it again.

The house we live in now was bought pretty cheap but needed a ton of work. My dh pretty much gutted and remodeled it from the ground up with the intention on selling it for a pretty profit. It took MONTHS to finish...(we ended up listing this house and our other house and our old house sold first so we moved in this one) we're very happy here though...probably the happiest we've been in any place we've lived.

[misfitinmn]

We're in the middle of something similar. We tore out a wall within a month of living here (we've been here for 1.5 years now) and it's STILL all ragged although we're closer to having it done. So just be prepared for it to take a LONG TIME. My husband thought he could DIY a lot of it, but he just doesn't have the time so we're to the point of hiring someone to do a lot of the legwork. We turned a back family room (we had 2 on the main level) into a mudroom/laundry room which relocated the garage door. So we still have to remove & patch up the old garage entry door, remove old studs in the ceiling from the wall we took down (well, a half wall remains around the stairs), scrape off popcorn ceiling, tear out cabinets & flooring, and tile our entry way & half bath before the hired guys can come in to mud/tape/texture the walls & ceiling, lay flooring, and install new cabinets.

Wow, I totally got off on another tangent there, didn't I??
In any case, I'm in the same boat as you! ;)

[Andrea Gourley]

We're doing a massive remodel at the moment on the house I just bought. I got the keys in November and so far have :

Ripped out the heating system, replaced with a new combi-boiler and radiators throughout
Ripped out the windows and replaced them all
Pulled down the wall between the kitchen and the big bedroom, moved it to make the bedroom slightly smaller and the kitchen slightly bigger and then rebuilt it
Pulled out the kitchen down to the brickwork and put in acompletely new one (the extra space on one side meant we could have units around three walls instead of only 2 so it has completely improved it)
Pulled out the bathroom completely, replaced the base floor, pulled out the boiler cupboard which was huge and took up a lot of the bathroom space and we longer needed it with the new heating sysytem and then put in a complete new bathroom
Pulled out all the internal woodwork, trims, architrave and doors and replaced all throughout
Rewired the entire house
Added soundproofing to the adjoining walls with our neighbours
Reboarded all teh ceilings
Replastered the entire house
Added coving to all the rooms
Painted all the rooms and now we're starting to furnish it all.

It has been really worth doing and what was a very dated 1960s house (with potential) is now bang up to date and because we've replaced everything it all looks like a brand new straight off the builder house.

What I have learned though is that even the little jobs take longer than you think they will, you never know what you will find when you rip something out or knock something down and it isn't the big things that soak up all your money it is the hundreds of screws, lengths of timber, plaster board and plastic plumbing pipes that you always need more of. Luckily for me none of the unexpected things that we've found as we've gone along have been major problems or disasters but they've taken up time that we wanted to use for other things and money that we wanted to spend on other things.

... and your house is always dusty no matter how often you sweep and vacuum :)

[KristinCB]

well as you know we have been doing our kitchen... the time it has taken has been about x10 (but this i don't think would be average for everyone - we have just had everything go wrong :P)

cost def. higher than budgeted

also i have a hard time making final decisions ;) LOL

[heathergw]

Thanks for all your replies... We are definitely going to do it in phases and we are all about buying used to help with cost... We're heading back to the restore on Wednesday as soon as it opens to buy the cabinets we were looking at... We're hopeful it's still there because I'm not sure there is high demand for 14 pieces lol and we were there almost to closing time on Saturday so unless someone came in the last hour, it should be there, soooo... That would be all our cabinets for $1,000... I know that's a huge chunk of savings... We already have all new appliances when we moved here 2 years ago... Basically we'll start with the kitchen and get rid of the U shape and make it L shaped and move the dishwasher to the other side of the sick... New countertop and new sink and the window we will replace too since that was one of the ones we didn't replace when we did some of the others ones in our house when they had that energy efficient tax refund incentive... Then we will see what's next and what we can afford from there... We desperately need to replace the hardwood floors, so that may be next...


And boy do I know about things taking longer than expected... We still have hunter green, burnt orange and harvest gold walls and a 2nd bathroom that's torn apart but is finally functional after 2 years of begging Mark and me finally having the flu and him realizing that maybe running up 3 flights of stairs when you are sick is not an easy task lol... I'm just do in the habit of running upstairs though that I've hardly used it yet lol

[heathergw]

Andrea... that's awesome... do you have pics? I'd love to see...

We bought a fixer upper and have done a TON of work already on this house too... but of course we ran into some major problems that took away a lot of our budget, so we had to give up our dreams to do some of them... but we had many of our windows replaced and the sliding glass door and we had the siding on the front of the house replaced and we've had to tear down several walls because of mold :( and rebuild them... we did a lot of rewiring too so that we could have an office in the lower level and a place for family to stay... we had to buy all new appliances too because nothing worked... and we replaced our heater and A/C... having a surprise pregnancy and a newborn made for quite a stop in getting things done, not to mention the medical bills that used up some of our house remodeling funds LOL

[SeattleSheri]

I would definitely gets some contractor quotes so you can compare. In some instances, depending on what you're doing and the amount of rework/mistakes you make due to lack of expertise may not make it worth it. We just a semiemodel on our kitchen and added bathroom for around $10k (minus the cost of appliances). There is no way we could have done it on our own. It required major plumbing and electrical modifications. I would consider doing some of it on your own with assistance from a contractor (unless you have some handy friends and family). Good luck!

[Sherri Tierney]

Ooh, have fun with it! I love remodeling! It definitely takes more time and $$ than we typically plan for but the results are so nice. :)

We've been here 3 years now and we haven't gotten nearly done what we had hoped. We have had to do some big jobs though, like replace the guttering all around the house, mess with the sewer system, etc. We've painted each room a few times because of bad color choices so that didn't help. LOL

I really want to do something with our kitchen. What I'd *like* to do would require a small addition though so I don't think that will happen any time soon. I NEED new counter tops in the worst way though and I'd love a new sink as we have an old brown porcelain one that is chipped in places and all scratched up so its just plain ugly.

[Sharon Kay]

It will take much more time than you think ... and surprisingly more money. We've done this a few times although it has been many years. At our old house we gutted the kitchen and moved a wall, replaced one wall, built solid oak cabinets from scratch, replaced all the underhouse plumbing, tiled the walls in kitchen ... redid the bathroom (not the tub) ... redid the electrical box ... added central air ... and added siding to the house. My husband was officially burned out. Nice thing is we sold the house for full price the first weekend shown.

It's now 20 years later ... and we have to remodel a bathroom in this house ... a leak ... and it's all going to be redone ... so dreading what this is going to cost ... even the tub goes in this remodel.