What Should Our Remodel Cost?

Remodeling magazine has a very famous report they do every year called 'Remodeling Magazines Cost vs. Value report' I am going to use the values from the report to get a ball park figure for our house remodel.

The report is pretty neat. They poll a ton of contractors, estimators, appraisers across the U.S. to get numbers for the costs of the 'standard' projects they track. To get the payback numbers they then poll a bunch of Realtors to arrive at a consensus view. To me it seems like the cost numbers are much more closely tied to reality vs the value numbers which seem more like a consensus of opinion.

Here's the main page of the interactive online report. You can click on your region and then if you're lucky you can click on a more specific region where you live to get numbers tied to your reality as closely as possible.

The San Francisco Bay area numbers can be found here. Its no surprise that the costs for our area are higher than the national average by a good amount.

The left most column is what the job costs and next is how much that job added to the resale value of the house. The third column is the most interesting in that its the % of cost recouped.

The SF Bay area info is most interesting and different from the national in that several jobs return more than they cost! The national average only shows that adding a steel front door returns more than it costs! San Francisco truly is a world onto its own.

The jobs that had a positive net return were (these are for the mid-range projects);

• 
  
  Attic Bedroom at 102.6%


• 
  
  Deck Addition at 104.2%


• 
  
  Window replacement (vinyl) 104.3%


• 
  
  Window replacement (wood) 104.5%


• 
  
  Minor Kitchen Remodel 112.2%


• 
  
  Entry door replacement 119.2%


• 
  
  Major Kitchen Remodel 100%

Hey that's looking really good for us as several of the above are projects that we plan on doing!

The only project that apparently will lose us money is the master suite addition which only returns 86.2%.

According to the descriptions the jobs that sync up most closely with our remodel plan are, Major kitchen remodel, attic bedroom, deck addition, master suite addition.

Attic bedroom: Cost = $65,829 Value= $67,531 Description: Convert unfinished attic space to a 15-by-15-foot bedroom and a 5-by-7-foot bathroom with shower. Include a 15-foot shed dormer, four new windows, and closet space under the eaves. Insulate and finish ceiling and walls. Carpet floor. Extend existing HVAC to new space; provide electrical wiring and lighting to code. Retain existing stairs, but add rail and baluster around stairwell.

Major Kitchen Remodel: Cost = $67,789 Value= $67,815 Description:Update an outmoded 200-square-foot kitchen with a functional layout of 30 linear feet of semi-custom wood cabinets, including a 3-by-5-foot island; laminate countertops; and standard double-tub stainless-steel sink with standard single-lever faucet. Include energy-efficient wall oven, cooktop, ventilation system, built-in microwave, dishwasher, garbage disposal, and custom lighting. Add new resilient flooring. Finish with painted walls, trim, and ceiling.

Deck Addition(wood): Cost= $13,642 Value=$14,196 Description: Add a 16-by-20-foot deck using pressure-treated joists supported by 4x4 posts anchored to concrete piers. Install pressure-treated deck boards in a simple linear pattern. Include a built-in bench and planter of the same decking material. Include stairs, assuming three steps to grade. Provide a complete railing system using pressure-treated wood posts, railings, and balusters.

Master Suite Addition: Cost= $132,443 Value= $114,104 Description: Add a 24-by-16-foot master bedroom suite over a crawlspace. Include walk-in closet/dressing area, whirlpool tub in ceramic tile platform, separate 3-by-4-foot ceramic tile shower, and double-bowl vanity with solid-surface countertop. Bedroom floor is carpet; bathroom floor is ceramic tile. Painted walls, ceiling, and trim. General and spot lighting, exhaust fan; electrical wiring to code.

The attic bedroom, major kitchen remodel, and deck addition are pretty much exactly what we are doing. The Master Suite addition is not as this entails building a new part of the house on its own foundation with its own new roof. We are just mostly using the space we already have but with the new dormers, and earthquake retro-fitting we have to do I feel its comparable.

Now for the total average costs of doing all these jobs here in the SF Bay area......drum roll please.....

Total Average Cost = $279703

Total Average Value = $263646

Net loss = $16,057

Not pocket change for sure but the above cost number is about half what we were quoted by Winans Construction. The above is an average and I used their mid-line numbers so there may be some wiggle room in that total but still...enough to double that number? I don't think so...

As a mostly DIY'er I can look at those cost & value numbers in a different way. If I can do those same jobs for significantly less than the value they add they should all pay back even more. If by doing some of the work ourselves we can get the master suite number below $100k we'll supposedly make money on all this when we sell the house! Ya right....

It is encouraging though to know that if you do the work yourself and do it decently well you can achieve a net payback when you sell...that is, if you believe these numbers...

Using the Upscale numbers where they exist (these projects really don't match ours if you read the descriptions as they are waaaay fancier than what we are doing) you get a total of...

Upscale Total = $507876

Still less than the cost we were quoted...for work that is fancier than what we've spec'd.

Looks like we are going to be shopping the plans out to some construction firms with less overhead than what we've been dealing with.

One Step Forward 2 Steps Back.

We haven't talked much lately about our dealings with the design-build firm we hired Winans Construction. That's because there really hasn't been that much to tell. They were supposed to deliver to us the final parts of our contract the week after Thanksgiving..... They showed up on our door the week after new years.... Anyone noticing a pattern here? They set this deadline and they blew right through it without as much as a 'by your leave.'

Irene and I had a chance to look over the plans they dropped off and we found numerous issues...here's a copy of the email I sent our project manager.

Hello xxx,
We’ve had time to look thru the plan set in detail and have some issues with what we are seeing and a couple of things that we don’t understand.

Plan Set Issues we have noticed so far.

1. Engineers plan is not what we decided on still shows new footing in radiant heated areas.

2.Concerned that showing the proposed deck at the back of the house will be an issue-confuse the planning and building dept people.

3.The plan shows the proposed rear deck starting 2’ in from the side of the house; we need it to start at the edge of the house and use the 2 existing columns.

4.Concerned Engineers drawings will be too light for city to accept. I have been chastised in the past for drawings where they thought the lines were too thin-too hard to read.

5.The engineer’s wet stamp is not included in price? How can his stamp not be included in the price? We do not understand this.

6.Your note says that we have 2 copies of the planning plan set and 3 copies of the building permit plan set. What I see is 5 copies of the building permit plan set. It is our understanding that the planning set should be different from the building permit plan set. I believe that the planning set needs to show such things as all exterior views before and after, and not show interior detail, the planning set might also require photographs of the exterior views of the house and the neighboring properties?

7.It looks to me like all the plans need to be ‘cleaned up’ there are spurious dimension lines, and dimensions, on the 2nd floor demo plan, the 1st floor construction plan, 2nd floor construction plan (G), and (H) is misnamed 2nd floor construction plan when it should be 2nd floor electrical plan. I mention this as I believe that these are the kinds of things that will get it kicked out of plan check in a hurry.

I’m sure that you are eager to bring this matter to a close, as are we, but these issues will need to be addressed to our satisfaction before we sign off on the project and send you the final check.

Respectfully,

I sent this Sunday night and have not yet heard back from anyone at Winnans. I think what chaps my hide the most is they are trying to get us to pay EXTRA for the engineers wet stamp. The plans are useless without it and there is no way that it shouldn't of been included in the original price.

What I'm afraid of is, Winnans uses the design services as a loss leader and then makes their margin on the construction side. They've realized by now that they are not going to get any construction money out of us and are trying to do as little additional work as possible to close out our contract...we of course will not pay until they complete their end of the agreement to our satisfaction. We've held back $2500 out of the $8500 total which I thought would be enough to get them hopping to finish this but apparently not...live and learn next time we'll hold back more.

They were also supposed to give us electronic versions of the files and Chief Architect X1 native versions of the files which they have done.

Our plan now is to shop out the permit ready plan set to several other builders to get quotes to see if the $500k+ figure we got from Winnans is waaay off the mark. If it turns out that all the quality builders we contact come in around the same price then we will move on to phase two.

We'll then have to act as GC's and shop out the 'shelling' of the house option to quality builders-framing crews. If the cost of this option is still way insane we will move onto phase three.

Phase three is paying Winnans Construction designer to adjust our plans for a much cheaper remodel where we don't alter the roof at all or the windows in the kitchen. Then we go back to the quality contractors we've already identified and get a consensus view on what it will cost to have them do the entire thing themselves versus us acting as GC's and doing some of the work ourselves.

Then we decide what its worth to us and which route we'll take. One thing I can safely say is that we will never take the $500k+ route...unless we hit the lottery big time that is.

Wow, no pictures!

More Ghetto Kitchen Goodness...With Lights!

So, we have a ghetto fab kitchen....but the problem was, that with the one single bright ceiling light in the center of the ceiling when ever you were working at one of the 'workstations' you shadowed it and it was hard to see. It was especially hard to see at the sink-stove area. Something had to be done.....Enter the ghetto lighting...

One thing we missed from our old wonderful super-fab kitchen was the under cabinet lighting. We kept finding ourselves instinctively reaching for the under cabinet switch when working at the counter under our lone kitchen cabinet. A quick trip to Home Despot yielded a 3-puck line voltage halogen under cabinet light kit.

The kit came with 3 lights but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what to do with the 3rd so we'll keep it as a spare. As it is I fabbed up an angled mounting bracket for one of them out of a scrap piece of 2by6...Ghetto!

But the results are certainly not ghetto. Check out how well lit the counter top underneath the cabinet is! And the counter top over the dishwasher! Doesn't that 'homemade' pizza look good under the warm halogen lights! As you can see behind Irene the sink-stove area is still pretty dark.

We needed a ceiling light over the sink-stove area but we didn't want something too bright. Here's me measuring out from the wall to center the light over the work area.

We went with this 2' long double fluorescent light that uses T-8 bulbs. It came with a cover and I figured it wouldn't look too shop-lighty.

Here's me doing some ghetto fab wiring. I hung it from the wall on one hook and wired it up with lamp cord...

Wiring's done! Doesn't that look classy! You can barely see the white lamp cord on the wall.

Putting the final installation touches on the light. It took me longer to put the diffuser on than it did to hang the dang thing!!!

Another example of ghetto awesomeness. The in-line switch couldn't fit the lamp cord so I only put the hot wire through the switch. Well, hopefully its the hot wire, as the plug I used is not polarized so depending on how its plugged in I could be switching the neutral...now which one is the neutral? The marked or unmarked wire???

Here's the fabulous light installed and turned on! Notice anything strange about the light? Does the color look a bit off perhaps? It doesn't really show in this photo in the daylight but the light bulbs were crazy hurts your eyes blueish purple! You couldn't even look at it for very long....

Turns out, at Pagano's the only type of lights they carry in this size are grow lights!!! Which were clearly not marked as such! Had to go back to home despot to get some regular fluorescent bulbs. See the difference in color! Crazy!

And here's a shot of the light with the correct bulbs installed. Its a little cool white but its fine.

Now, check out how bright our kitchen is! The sink-stove area is so brightly lit that I realized that I need to do a better job of cleaning around the washer and dryer. Irene washed the baby tonight and everything was brightly lit and THAT BABY GOT CLEAN!

Chez Neumansky 2009 Top Ten List

Ya I know you're totally sick of top ten lists by now but hey, 'tis the season right?

So, in the spirit of the end-of-the-year season here's the Chez's top ten favorite/significant things that happened here this year.

10. This wasn't really a fun thing but a significant thing for sure. Our neighbors wonderful humongous Boxwood Alder tree falling in a storm and narrowly missing crushing us and our neighbor!

9. Cleaning up the attic and moving all our office stuff up there so that we could create a baby safe room on the main floor.

8. Dan took up the sport of 'Knife Catching' and caught a lot of flack about it.

7. Tasha's 2nd Burning Man was great fun for everyone! With no one going up in flames and no one getting arrested!

7a. All the super-fab low-budget ghetto make overs we did on the house.

6. The Super Great 4th of July party we had.

5. We FINALLY, FINALLY got the heat up and running and inspected after many, many, many months of work.

4. Halloween was the biggest, bestest, cutest Halloween Ever!

3. We discovered how much it was going to cost to have professionals redo our house and almost had heart attacks when looking at the number.

2. Learning how to pre-date posts so it looks like we got our end of the year list done before the end of the year!

And finally could #1 be anything else but...

1. Having a new member of the Chez Neumansky team!!!

Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at Chez Neumansky!!!!

We've Got Back Door Issues...

That sounds kinda naughty doesn't it? Or maybe I just have a dirty mind.

The back door to the house that enters through the kitchen is in bad shape. An incorrectly installed door sweep had turned the bottom part of the door into mush. The paint was wholesale failing over most of the door also. That's not too hard to believe as this door faces south and gets full sun and all the wind driven rain.

We got lucky and had a week of unusually warm weather-like in the 80's. This was fortunate as it allowed the door to dry out as much as possible before I had to paint it. Actually, by the end of the week the door had shrunk so much that it was easy to open and close against the new bottom threshold where initially it required a bit of work.

Here's the back door after I cleaned, scraped and sanded all the loose paint off that I could.

Here's a shot of the bottom part of the door. Why in the world would you make an exterior door out of this press board stuff? It soaks up water like a sponge and turns to mush!. With the door as dry as it was ever going to be I decided to paint it and hopefully it would soak up enough primer that this area would be protected-ish.

Here's an exciting picture of me rolling on the primer with a super cool mini roller. I used this thing to roll the primer on everything and it worked great and was way faster than doing it all with a brush. Like I thought, the bottom part of the door soaked up paint like a sponge. I think I put 3 heavy coats in that area...hopefully it will all dry before I have to close the door for the night, to keep the cats in and the cold air out.

I waited a week for the primer to dry and then went to work installing weather stripping on the door. As you can see from this shot even though the bottom was sealed up well there was still a substantial gap along the latch side that was allowing a fair amount of air in. Look at all that sunlight!

So, back to Pagano's I went for some weather stripping (man I'm glad that place is literally 3 blocks from our house.) This weather stripping has a flexible bulb on the end. You hold it against the door so that the bulb is evenly compressed and screw it to the door stop.

And here's a shot of all three sides of the door done. Doing this dramatically cut down on the breeze coming from this area. Before doing this make sure your door latch-striker plate are aligned and in good shape. I will need to reset-fix mine up to get the full benefit of the weather stripping. Now the stripping pushes back on the door enough that there is still a slight gap on the handle side of the door. Ah well, live and learn.

With these improvements and the insulation in the floor this area is now quite toasty and the babies room is definitely warmer. We've been using an electric space heater in there as a booster to the radiant but now we don't need it unless its SUPER cold outside.

We're on the Threshold of...

GREATNESS!!!

We've been on a tear here lately at the Chez getting things buttoned up for the winter. One of the things we needed to tackle was our back door. There was an 1.5" gap between the bottom of the door and the rotted out old wood threshold and when it was cold outside an icy wind would blow through this gap. Since this door is right next to the babies room with only a heavy curtain separating it, it was a high priority to get this huge source of cold air sealed up before it got really cold.

Here's the old wooden threshold and the bizarre gap in the floorboards it was spanning. This gap was full of old leaves, rat poop, and decomposing somethings or another. I got all the gunk out and vacuumed it and the wood underneath was in great condition. Yay for old growth redwood.

If you notice in the top pic at the bottom of the door a door sweep was installed with about 100 screws...Unfortunately it was installed so incorrectly that it trapped water between it and the door. It hadn't rained for weeks but when I removed it, the bottom of the door was soaking wet and spongy! Not good...plus check out the failing paint.

Luckily this area was framed with the correct slope so that any water in this area would drain away from the house and to the deck.

The weird gap exactly fits a standard 2by6. Why in the world didn't someone fill this gap years ago?

Since the slope was correct I used some leftover flashing tape to form a sill pan. If any water gets under the new threshold it should drain out the bottom without soaking into the framing and ruining it. The flashing tape is tucked up under the door trim on either side also.

I used a pull saw to trim back the door trim in this area to fit the new threshold. I wish I had a real flush-cutting pull saw but this one worked well enough.

Because of how wide the gap was and how wide my sill pan was I had to improvise a bit. I installed the new aluminum threshold in its proper place and then I used a leftover 5/4" by 6" piece of Ipe to cover the rest of the sill pan. I kerfed the bottom of the Ipe with my SCMS so that any water that runs down the door and down the aluminum threshold will still drain out between the Ipe and the flashing tape sill pan. After this pic was taken I trimmed the flashing tape flush with the Ipe.

Success!!! Here's a shot of the finished product from the inside. The 1.5" gap is completely filled and there is no icy cold draft from this area any more!! Hurray!!

Next up we need to work on fixing up the door to make it through the winter rainy season.

Yay! For Caulk!

So, The front porch area of our house is not in great shape. Lots of dry rot and cracks, old caulk failing and paint peeling up or just disappeared all together. We thought it would be wise to do something about it before these humongous storms were supposed to pelt the area.

What we will have to do sometime in the not-to-distant-future is rebuild a lot of the porch with rot resistant wood and proper drainage detailing...we don't gots no money for that right now so we are going to band aid it through this winter.

What follows is several exciting shots of caulking!!! Hold on to your hats kids!

First off, we had to scrape up all the old paint and hardened caulk off of the porch, the stairs and well everywhere. Here I am cleaning the dust out of the porch board gaps with a chip brush so the caulk would have some chance of sticking.

After scraping and sanding and brushing and vacuuming off all the old paint we wiped down everything with denatured alcohol to get things as clean as possible. To hopefully give the primer and caulk a good chance of working.

The local hardware store Pagano's had this white, fast drying acrylic modified latex caulk with a 35yr rating on sale. So we bought an f-ton of it and went to work. I caulked all the gaps in the deck boards along with all the edges of the steps and well everywhere I thought was needed. We went through a ton of caulk. I gotta say, the quick drying stuff wasn't too bad to work with. It did take more water to smooth it out as it comes outta the tube much stiffer than the regular stuff. But it did dry fast enough that I was able to put 2 coats of a quality primer on with enough time for it to dry before the rain hit.

Here's an example of some badly rotted areas that I bandaided with caulk and backer rod. This part of the porch was really dry rotted so I dug out all the bad wood stuffed the hole with backer rod and filled it with caulk. Now at least the water should run off the edge here and not seep into the garage below.

We also caulked the edges of the steps. It didn't really look like there was any caulk applied when these were built...but we caulked and spot primed and put 2 coats of primer on the treads...hopefully it will get us through the winter.

If you look closely at the first picture you can see that these horizontal surfaces are in bad shape. These ledges slope the wrong way so water pools in the corners and they are rotting out! I scrapped off all the old failing paint, sanded it and put a coat of primer on then caulked the bejesus out of it then put on another coat of primer. I admit that I kinda f'd up the last time I painted these stairs as I used a primer not designed for outdoor use and it failed pretty quickly...

Its rained a couple times and the band aid job is holding out pretty well. There is hardly any water seeping through to soak things in the garage.