Renovation (Week 28, Part 2)
The house is done. It is really done. We could move in today. A detailed set of photos from this weekend can be found here.
We knocked down a couple walls, reconfigured to the space to be more useful, gutted the kitchen and bathrooms, replaced all of the electrical and plumbing, rebuilt the chimney, replaced the roof, replaced some of the hardwood floors, refinished the rest, and it only took 7 months. :-)
I'm not sure that I'll be able to accurately reflect on the process very well in this post. It's kind of overwhelming to think about. I had never been around anyone who had ever done something like this before so I didn't really know what to expect. Everyone in my family has always done their own renovation work and hired people to only do specific jobs that they didn't want to do themselves. Even my friends have been doing the same.
I'm very happy with the results but I don't yet have the perspective to tell me whether we could have gotten more for less money if we had done more ourselves. Yes, of course we could have assuming that neither Laurel nor I had jobs or could have dedicated more of our mental abilities to the job or we did it over a 15 year period of time. But would we have been happy in those situations?
It might have been much less overwhelming if we had thought of these projects in separate chunks. In fact, we had at some point, but we kept on getting back to the idea that if we do something we might as well do other things at the same time so our lives are only disrupted once. There's probably something to be said for that. We could have done the roof and the chimney completely separately, it would have cost less because we wouldn't have had to pay the general contractor's 15% overhead and profit. We could have done the front bedroom extension into the entryway by itself but we probably would have never thought of it if it wasn't for the architect. I really had no idea that knocking down non-load-baring walls wasn't that big of a deal. The kitchen would still have been a major project, I really did want to get rid of the wall between the kitchen and dining room from the beginning, but I never would have thought to close off the other entrance and shortened the hallway. I can't imagine that Laurel or I would have thought to make the built-in lighting so nice. There were a lot of little details, like the way the lines continued from the peninsula to the cabinets across the kitchen, that are nice and make the house look amazing but are things that we never ever would have thought of, or really even cared about.
A lot of people have asked me about whether the whole Architect/General Contractor thing was a good choice. I can't really answer that because the outcomes would have been completely different. I probably would have been happy with both. I am definitely happy with our current situation. Though, I did feel like at the beginning we were being whirled around into a land that we weren't completely comfortable with. I can't speak for Laurel, but I'm not used to the idea of spending lots of money thinking about the interior lighting of our house. I can appreciate the difference between nice lighting and bad lighting, but I never would have explicitly decided to pay somebody to make our house's lighting "better". At one point during the design process I felt like there was a cabal of architects and contractors who plan to make people give their money to them. I know that it's not explicit like that, but it is indeed an industry that needs to keep itself afloat.
So, I didn't answer the question. Here's my one-size-fits-all answer:
We knocked down a couple walls, reconfigured to the space to be more useful, gutted the kitchen and bathrooms, replaced all of the electrical and plumbing, rebuilt the chimney, replaced the roof, replaced some of the hardwood floors, refinished the rest, and it only took 7 months. :-)
I'm not sure that I'll be able to accurately reflect on the process very well in this post. It's kind of overwhelming to think about. I had never been around anyone who had ever done something like this before so I didn't really know what to expect. Everyone in my family has always done their own renovation work and hired people to only do specific jobs that they didn't want to do themselves. Even my friends have been doing the same.
I'm very happy with the results but I don't yet have the perspective to tell me whether we could have gotten more for less money if we had done more ourselves. Yes, of course we could have assuming that neither Laurel nor I had jobs or could have dedicated more of our mental abilities to the job or we did it over a 15 year period of time. But would we have been happy in those situations?
It might have been much less overwhelming if we had thought of these projects in separate chunks. In fact, we had at some point, but we kept on getting back to the idea that if we do something we might as well do other things at the same time so our lives are only disrupted once. There's probably something to be said for that. We could have done the roof and the chimney completely separately, it would have cost less because we wouldn't have had to pay the general contractor's 15% overhead and profit. We could have done the front bedroom extension into the entryway by itself but we probably would have never thought of it if it wasn't for the architect. I really had no idea that knocking down non-load-baring walls wasn't that big of a deal. The kitchen would still have been a major project, I really did want to get rid of the wall between the kitchen and dining room from the beginning, but I never would have thought to close off the other entrance and shortened the hallway. I can't imagine that Laurel or I would have thought to make the built-in lighting so nice. There were a lot of little details, like the way the lines continued from the peninsula to the cabinets across the kitchen, that are nice and make the house look amazing but are things that we never ever would have thought of, or really even cared about.
A lot of people have asked me about whether the whole Architect/General Contractor thing was a good choice. I can't really answer that because the outcomes would have been completely different. I probably would have been happy with both. I am definitely happy with our current situation. Though, I did feel like at the beginning we were being whirled around into a land that we weren't completely comfortable with. I can't speak for Laurel, but I'm not used to the idea of spending lots of money thinking about the interior lighting of our house. I can appreciate the difference between nice lighting and bad lighting, but I never would have explicitly decided to pay somebody to make our house's lighting "better". At one point during the design process I felt like there was a cabal of architects and contractors who plan to make people give their money to them. I know that it's not explicit like that, but it is indeed an industry that needs to keep itself afloat.
So, I didn't answer the question. Here's my one-size-fits-all answer:
- If the project is small and not scary then do it yourself.
- If the project is small but a little scary then hire a contractor to do the job.
- If the project is large and overwhelming and you don't mind spending some time coordinating things then hire an architect on an hourly basis and get advice from him. A full set of drawings is probably not that important. Hire contractors to do the work as necessary.
- If the project is large and overwhelming and you can't deal with each of the contractors or how they are going to interact with each other then hire a general contractor.
- If the project is large and overwhelming and you can't spend any time dealing with stuff hire an architect and general contractor to do everything.
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