If you are considering renovating your home, buying a home to renovate, or flipping a house, this will give you some insight as to what it really takes to do a total home renovation.

Week 3 and 4
After gutting the entire interior of the house, the wiring, and plumbing, needs to be replaced. Seeming these are things that I am not willing to allow my husband to do, in fear that he might blow himself or the house up, we brought in the professionals!

After these two weeks, the stress scale hit a nine on the stress “o” meter. Some problems we came across were:

Issue #1 was finding a good plumber and electrician. No easy task! There are a number of excellent resources available such as the Home Renovation Guide that can make the search easier, but we knew that with the amount of work that was apparent, both these teams would be in the house for at least a week each.

The Plumber!
The plumber was great in the end. After 5 days they had completed all that was needed (which was everything!). Every pipe in the house was replaced, as it had been 80 years since anything had been. Additionally, the hot water tank needed to be move to open up the space in the laundry room, the basin sinks relocated to accommodate the washer dryer, and a drain needed to be dug up in the basement and run out side, to eliminate further water damage, and the list ran on, and on, and on.

Issues Encountered
The main pipe that ran from the basement, up through the kitchen, and then up into the bathroom, was rotten! This was something that we thought (the plumbers and us), would have been okay as it was the original cast iron pipe. Of course with replacement, come added costs, and more time. However, replacing this also eliminated the smell of urine that was so predominate.

The second major problem we ran into was in the basement. As mentioned earlier a drain needed to be created outside that would act as a place for the water run off instead of going into the basement. Once they began digging the way for the pipe, they realized that the pipe they were going to link to was broken. So add another day, and more money.

Over all because we supplied the materials, and were able to work out flat rates with them, we were only $245 over the plumbing budget, but still had significant savings from the original quote.

Electrical
Well, knob-and-tube is just as confusing as it sounds. Who really knows how it works, and why it was legal? With the condition of the knob and tube, the house would have burned down long before the breaker went … words right from the electrician.

Again, we supplied the materials, which helped save money, but it was also time consuming because there were things that we could not find easily. That said, here are some of the “fun” encounters we had:

• Time - these guys are not timely! As patience is a virtue, one in which I try hard to possess, without success, this was terrible for me! They make their own schedule, and seemed to have dragged things on for over two weeks, while it could have been done in 5 days if they worked consecutive days.

• Of course, there were problems! Trying to feed the new lines through the house prompted some harsh words under the breath of the electrical team. Because of the board and batten walls that currently existed, it was not easy to get the lines up. Moreover, the existing electrical in the house was sparse, so there were a lot of new light fixtures, switches and outlets put in to get the house up to code.

In the end, the electrician has to come back once more after the drywall is finished to put up the faceplates and futures.

Well, these two weeks were not as exciting as next week, when we stop demolishing and start rebuilding! Yep, the walls are going up, and the exterior is being started.

Suggestions
Here are a few suggestions to make sure that your stress “o” meter doesn’t hit the 10!

• Ask if you can supply the materials. This saved us a great deal of money by avoiding the mark-up of at least 10%.

• Ask if you can pay a flat rate instead of by the hour. That way they want the job done speedily as well.

• Get at least 2 quotes to hear out any suggestions that they may have. Contractors can tell you how to save space, money and time if you listen, and you can see what they offer that is different if the prices really vary.

• Lastly, you are going to have to interact with the people you hire, so like them! Money is not always the deciding factor, your sanity is too…