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You did it all, backwards, in the same year...

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By Natalie

Recap of 2014!


Got married  - October
Had a baby - September
Broke an arm - September
Started kindergarten - August
Went back to school -  May
Major house rennovation restarted - May
Sold some property - April
Took a new job - January


And where are we on the house...

The roofwork is looking good. We restored the slate roof and added gutters. We finished the plaster upstairs, added HVAC, added tile, actually...it's kind of hard to remember all of the things we did to the house. In showing off the place recently I was startled to realize that a year ago we were living without real heat in three rooms of the drafty old place. Now we can wander around almost the entire place with climate control and have a delicious baby daughter. What an incredible year.










And what's in store?
Finish tile work in the bathrooms - our tile guy disappeared in August with the job half done. He's too busy for his own good.
Finish the trim work - headers, quarter round, picture rail
Paint the interiror trim
Paint the exterior of the house
Create and install better lights in the upstairs hallways
Re-install the fancy woodwork in the hallways
Finish the girls bathroom
Figure out exactly what we want the butler pantry to look like
Replace a bathroom window
Paint the walls in the bathrooms

Summer kitchen?
Butler pantry?
reopen the service stair?



What about that budget of yours?
When I talked Harris into buying this house I made a 30+ line item budget for everything imaginable that might need to be fixed in the house. I then put hard or soft numbers with each line item and added 15% at the end for fringe. This became the 'most the house could possibly cost' budget. We then ended up paying our max budget for the house, doing the kitchen right from the beginning instead of a temp kitchen, and a couple of things took a little longer than expected (plaster, exterior rot repairs, termite damage repairs to name a few). This spring, once Harris finishes installing the trim, we'll have painters do the interior trim and paint the outside. At that point, we'll be at 106% of our 'most it coud possibly cost' budget or about $120/sqft to purchase and restore the house.  Yes, we've broken the mental $400k ceiling to buy and restore the house. This is why we don't go on vacations or have a real savings account.

At some point in the future we will finish the master suite and sunroom downstairs. The estimates we got there were pretty high cost and timewise, so we'll just see what happens and when we're ready to do them. There are a lot of elements of it we can do ourselves in the meantime that will dramatically cut the cost and it's not like we're wanting for space.

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