Remodeling: Dealing with the Unexpected
Hey everyone, it’s been a while since last writing. We’ve been working so hard, taking care of business, that I almost forgot to take care of the real business — YOU.
Recently we’ve invested in three properties that need various amounts of renovation. The one I want to speak about now is our Fredericksburg single family home on one acre. This place was owned by a man who had many difficulties keeping the place up. After he passed away, his son inherited the property and realized that he had neither the time, the resources, nor the energy to tackle the renovation needed to either live in the property or to sell it conventionally. And this guy is even in the building trades, so you can imagine the amount of work we were up against when we got the call to consider purchasing the property!
A careful assessment was completed and a renovation budget was prepared. The potential of this property is awesome, but we knew we would have to roll up our sleeves to tackle this baby! Even with our many years of experience, this one posed a couple of challenges:
#1) There was a full unfinished basement with a drive-in garage under the 
house, lending itself to a terrific amount of additional living space, and we had to re-design the finished basement with today’s active family in mind. A powder room was decided upon to complement the huge family recreation room, the newly separated garage, and the large laundry/storage/utility room entering from the outside. The advice we got from our team was to make the floorplan open, but with some separation for multiple activities. With some work, we created a media room that opens to a recreation area. They are separate enough for dual activities, but the new owner can easily encompass both areas if needed.
#2) We were caught off guard by the number of floor cuts we had to make in 
order to meet today’s new codes for the laundry room drain and the utility floor drain. These were in addition to the new powder room piping we installed. For our guys, it was no problem that a major concrete saw and a jack hammer couldn’t deal with. Of course, don’t forget the good old fashioned shovel needed to dig down to the under-slab piping. The inspections process wasn’t so bad, after we got help from the inspections and code officials.
Even if you know the business as well as we do, seek out any and all help. You won’t regret the time you spent to get it done right the first time. We know from experience that it is a heck of a lot cheaper to do it right and pay for it once than to tear it out and do it a second time.
Tags: distressed property, fixer uppers, for sale, homebuyer advice, homebuying, house for sale, real estate, Renovations, repairs, single family home, virginia
This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Advice for Homebuyers, Case Studies, Our Projects, Renovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
