Do I really want to remodel my house?

[tuftears]

All right, I've mentioned this from time to time in my comments, but basically when I let my parents stay at my house, ostensibly to keep an eye on me, they wound up cluttering the place. There are a bunch of repairs that need to be done on it, and the wiring is just old and not intended for modern standards - the kitchen breaker goes out if someone runs a TV in the dining room at the same time as the dishwasher, for instance.

So my initial plan was to refurbish the place. Repaint the walls, rebuild the kitchen, it should be like a couple months, right?

Well, had a contractor in today to talk about it... After I explained what I was thinking of doing - stuff like this SketchUp model - he said that it would be feasible to, as I wanted, remove the fireplaces and the kitchen side wall, but with all the demolishing needed and rebuilding - basic things like the wiring and plumbing - it would probably take some six months or so.

He recommended that I think about demolishing the entire house and rebuilding from the start, and having struggled with the floor plan as I try to figure out where I can put everything, I can see his point. The current floor plan is just tight and cramped. But that gets pricey!

Then we went down to look at the house that he was building for a client - not mock-Tuscan as I was trying, and failing, to emulate, but the real thing. It was gorgeous.

It was also intimidating as heck. This wasn't an ordinary house, this was a mansion. $2 million for the house alone on a property worth $5 mil. Dang!

But it was gorgeous, I'll give it that! Here are a few pictures.

The office:


The kitchen:


The kitchen sink:


One of the bathrooms, a small one:


The other bathroom, unfortunately blurry:


So what I'm currently faced with is a choice between these alternatives:

1. Scale back my plans drastically but go ahead with the remodeling. Stuff like faux marble walls or Venetian plaster go out the window. Fresh coat of paint, do what's needed but no more. I'll still be dealing with a wretched floor plan. Probably take 4-6 months to finish.

2. Demolish the house, build a new one with a more awesome floor plan. It will probably look a lot nicer. We could be looking at a year to be done.

3. Buy a new house, sell this one. Property taxes go up about 25% plus I go through the hassle of refinancing, but I don't have to do any remodeling, just furnish the new house, and I can move in nearly immediately.

I'm going to evaluate my options over the coming weeks. As some of you know, I am a misercat so I hate spending money... But my current house is falling apart visibly. And if I'm going to get significant repairs, why not go a little farther and make it look nice?

Oy! Decisions, decisions.

Comments

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

No, an ordinary detached house in a city. Houses are usually about 16"x30" up here, on lots that are twice those dimensions (or for neighborhoods like this, maybe 1.5x as wide and 3x as long as the house itself).

Houses here are usually main floor/upper floor/basement, so it's double or triple the footprint's square footage, depending on whether you've furnished the basement or not. There's usually a crawl space above the upper floor, but it's very rare for that to be used for anything but storage (and even that isn't a given).

I'd never live in a townhouse (assuming that means the same thing down there as it does up here: the equivalent of several houses stuck side to side with firewalls separating them). All it would take would be a kitchen fire or cigarette fire in one unit to have every unit burning, firewalls or no firewalls (firewalls stop localized fires but don't save you if everything including the roof is ablaze). Fires like that hit the news every year or so. Risk-averse kitty is risk-averse =^.^=.

Semi-detached houses (sharing one wall) are a grey area for me, though I'd still strongly prefer detached (don't have to worry about waking anyone up if doing laundry at 3am, or about carpentry noise during the day, etc).

I take it you're in suburbs or elsewhere where land is cheaper?

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Err, 16' by 30'. 3 hours of sleep will result in typos like that, before you make wisecracks };>.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

No, it's a normal city, but out here houses tend to be one floor, no basement or second floor! Townhouses are side by side, but they're also multi-floor and narrow. You lose a lot of space in stairwells, which is why Disapproving Cat Disapproves.

My square footage is about 1479 or so.