Adventures at The Bunny Manse

I finally had a chance to sit down and update the budget spreadsheet with the purchases from the past year. I've been keeping a spreadsheet from the moment Harris said, "ok, let's talk about it..." that realistically laid out how much everything could possibly cost. Originally, we estimated that the total restoration of the house would cost about $269,000 based on previous work, sqft, general guesses, and hope.  This project was costed by us after spending about 60 minutes in the house. After almost 1000 days, we ended up spending about $315,000 to restore the house. Seems like a nice round place to stop for now. Where were our estimates wrong (off by 25% or more)? Electrical work - why? More wires had to be fished through walls, the whole house amps had to be increased, etc. Plaster - Ed was wonderful, but he ended up taking about an additional 3 weeks to do the whole house and his lower cost helper went on vacation at some point... Interior woodwork ...

I just posted a ton of pictures without any content. This is because I see this as a place to collect and frame my thoughts about the house process with some images to trigger the ideas. We're so close. After this last stage (paint, gutters) we have some tile repair in one bathroom, some tile work in another bathroom + installing new fixtures, and then we just have PHASE 4 which is master bedroom + sunroom. We're not doing PHASE 4 for awhile. We need to pay off some credit cards and the like. Oh? You didn't know that at some point everyone who is not independently wealthy puts part of their renovation on credit cards balancing who has to be paid in cash and who you can float? You didn't realize that 0% interest for 12-18 month cards will provide you an interest free loan to buy materials that you then pay off in installments or move the money to other 0% cards? Yeah. We've got probably $30k of our project sitting out there on 0% credit cards right now + an equ...

We can has asbestos? YA! YOU CAN HAS ASBESTOS! :not happy: We're getting an estimate for remediation now. We were going to focus on getting the HVAC installed then said, hrm- that old plumber who was out said every one of these old houses has asbestos, because he used to work on the boilers - let's make sure we don't have asbestos before we start heating and piping air through the house. Oh guess what! We do!  It's in several places around the crawl space, basically following the path of the old steam radiator pipes. They are going to have to cut the metal out of the crawl space, dig out the dirt in places where it's already fallen from the pipe and then do some negative pressure thing with the air. So. Yeah. Also, we found some weird wires that we're going to have looked at next week. We're getting our tax credits back over the next 4-6 weeks so were planning how we would spend the money. Looks like...more non-sexy things that are most defi...

Dad was asking about the budget and how we're doing so far. Initially we had a total budget of about $350k for the house. As we negotiated the purchase price up and found more information about what the house needed that budget went to a maximum of about $415k. As of today, we anticipate spending around $400k or ~$111/sqft. As a comparison, Oakwood cost us $90/sqft and we sold for $106/sqft and the new owners are doing all kinds of neat stuff we dreamed about doing. So far we're under budget in a couple of areas, within budget but ahead of schedule in some (which can also be read as over budget...) and just going to be way over in a couple of key areas. Our original plan including making a temporary kitchen that we could live with, but would be massively overhauled within a year or two. Instead we decided to do it right the first time and enjoy it the entire time. To this end, our temp budget for cabs, appliances, and counters, was initally $5,600. However, that's g...