House: before
Jan. 18th, 2008 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungSo, as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morgan_dhu has chronicled, after 4 months of searching, looking at hundreds of listings and touring at least 50 houses in person, we finally found a decent-sized bungalow in a transit-accessible neighbourhood that we could afford that was in acceptable condition. If that seems a long time to look, recall that 90% of bungalows are small tiny things, because if the original buyer of such a place had the money for a roomy house, then they would have bought a standard 2 storey house instead.
We were lucky that the owner (a 98 year old woman who had finally decided to move into assisted living) was in a terrible hurry to sell and did not leave the house on the market for long, which enabled us to be the only people making an offer by their deadline for considering offers. So we got the house for, I am told, 30k less than what other houses in similar condition in the neighbourhood are going for.
It met our requirements of having a decent sized living room,
Two bedrooms,
And one extra room, in this case a dining room at the end of the living room:
Not that we planned to have that many rooms anything, but that we knew from experience that 2 bedrooms plus living room and other gave enough space to do what we wanted, whereas 2 bedrooms plus living room only did not.
The kitchen was small but functional:
And the bathroom was too tiny to even bother taking a picture of it, but that was OK because we knew we had to gut and expand the bathroom in order to make it accessible formorgan_dhu. The bathroom had an ajoining hallway:
and an adjoining closet, which would let us turn it from a 1.5m x 1.8m water closet (emphasis on the closet) into a 2.4m x 2.4 m bathroom with a huge walk in shower and plenty of walking and turning space formorgan_dhu, who is not very mobile.
Oh, and I should mention that it had an attached garage at the back end:
Plus the basement was finished (perhaps too finished -- how many furnace rooms have a fully finished ceiling?) and the inspector thought it merited a 4 out of 5 in terms of condition (ie, well above average). So we bought it, and had drawings made of the way it was:
And more drawings of how it should be:
In other words, create a new back door leading to a deck and a very gentle set of stairs (not shown above) to make an accessible entrance, combine the two back bedrooms into a living room, make the dining room bigger and call it a study, and make the living room into a bedroom. Then take all the space from the closet and hallway and add it to the bathroom to make something nice and roomy and accessible.
So we interviewed contractors. The small accessibility contractor recommended by our agent became unavailable in between interviewing him and soliciting a quote. The large accessibility contracting company blew us off with a quote for only half of what we wanted done, but what do you expect for a company that does installations for a big box store, professionalism? Andrew Weatherill, the general purpose contractor recommended by a friend as being "expensive but worth it" quoted us around $69,000, and Shawn Morren (crew foreman for the first 5 or so seasons of Holmes on Homes), who I called on the off chance that he would be able to recommend someone, and who turned out to be willing and available to take the job himself, quoted us around $76,000. Once we scaled back both quotes a bit, and did an apple-to-apple comparison, it was a toss-up with a small difference of only about 3-4k between them. So we swallowed hard, took several fearful glances at the pitiful sum left in savings, and hired Shawn, who we felt we would get along with and communicate with better.
Up next: Shawn and his crew destroy things astonishingly fast.
ETA: corrected the spelling of Morgan's LJ name, clarified & expanded the bit about choosing contractors a bit.
morgan_dhu has chronicled, after 4 months of searching, looking at hundreds of listings and touring at least 50 houses in person, we finally found a decent-sized bungalow in a transit-accessible neighbourhood that we could afford that was in acceptable condition. If that seems a long time to look, recall that 90% of bungalows are small tiny things, because if the original buyer of such a place had the money for a roomy house, then they would have bought a standard 2 storey house instead.We were lucky that the owner (a 98 year old woman who had finally decided to move into assisted living) was in a terrible hurry to sell and did not leave the house on the market for long, which enabled us to be the only people making an offer by their deadline for considering offers. So we got the house for, I am told, 30k less than what other houses in similar condition in the neighbourhood are going for.
It met our requirements of having a decent sized living room,
Two bedrooms,
And one extra room, in this case a dining room at the end of the living room:
Not that we planned to have that many rooms anything, but that we knew from experience that 2 bedrooms plus living room and other gave enough space to do what we wanted, whereas 2 bedrooms plus living room only did not.
The kitchen was small but functional:
And the bathroom was too tiny to even bother taking a picture of it, but that was OK because we knew we had to gut and expand the bathroom in order to make it accessible for
morgan_dhu. The bathroom had an ajoining hallway:and an adjoining closet, which would let us turn it from a 1.5m x 1.8m water closet (emphasis on the closet) into a 2.4m x 2.4 m bathroom with a huge walk in shower and plenty of walking and turning space for
morgan_dhu, who is not very mobile.Oh, and I should mention that it had an attached garage at the back end:
Plus the basement was finished (perhaps too finished -- how many furnace rooms have a fully finished ceiling?) and the inspector thought it merited a 4 out of 5 in terms of condition (ie, well above average). So we bought it, and had drawings made of the way it was:
And more drawings of how it should be:
In other words, create a new back door leading to a deck and a very gentle set of stairs (not shown above) to make an accessible entrance, combine the two back bedrooms into a living room, make the dining room bigger and call it a study, and make the living room into a bedroom. Then take all the space from the closet and hallway and add it to the bathroom to make something nice and roomy and accessible.
So we interviewed contractors. The small accessibility contractor recommended by our agent became unavailable in between interviewing him and soliciting a quote. The large accessibility contracting company blew us off with a quote for only half of what we wanted done, but what do you expect for a company that does installations for a big box store, professionalism? Andrew Weatherill, the general purpose contractor recommended by a friend as being "expensive but worth it" quoted us around $69,000, and Shawn Morren (crew foreman for the first 5 or so seasons of Holmes on Homes), who I called on the off chance that he would be able to recommend someone, and who turned out to be willing and available to take the job himself, quoted us around $76,000. Once we scaled back both quotes a bit, and did an apple-to-apple comparison, it was a toss-up with a small difference of only about 3-4k between them. So we swallowed hard, took several fearful glances at the pitiful sum left in savings, and hired Shawn, who we felt we would get along with and communicate with better.
Up next: Shawn and his crew destroy things astonishingly fast.
ETA: corrected the spelling of Morgan's LJ name, clarified & expanded the bit about choosing contractors a bit.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-18 08:48 pm (UTC)It's been an experience, dealig with the minutiae of acquiring and renovating a house. So many people to talk to and so many forms to file, so many things to think about.
The renovation, especially - if you've been a renter all your life, you get used to just accepting wharever the quirks are in the best apartment you can find. You deal with whatever kind of sink the landlord put in, or how the doors are hung, or where the outlets and light switches are, and so on.
And suddenly, you have to make all of those decisions, and you start thinking - in an ideal world, how do I want that door right there to open - inward, outward, hinges on the right or the left? - becasue you can make it that way.
And even the things you don't really give a fuck about - for instance, in my case, the fixtures on the sinks - you have to make choices about becasue you have to tell the contractor what kind of tap to install, and the choices are endless, and often pointless and sometimes even imperceptible to my eye.
And so it goes.