A CHANGE IN PLANS HOUSE UPDATE

A lot of you have asked about the house update plans so that's what we are doing here with this post.

We had a post ready to go all Spring and then into Summer about a possible special announcement, but, well, read on...

You may have noticed a few times last year we mentioned having people out to the house.  Well, we were having a couple of contractors out to work up proposals for a remodel.

Here's how that went:

One group set an appointment, we got everything ready, etc, and then the day before, they said they realized it was too far from their office and they wouldn't be able to supervise it well enough.  Um, maybe use Google maps sooner?  Whatever. 

A second guy came out and talked to us, made some measurements and then we didn't hear from him for a while.  He finally said he was not really going to do whole house remodels anymore but he'd be willing to try.  Um, better to find that out before he started!

Another company never came out but after we reached out to them and communicated back and forth a bit to reschedule, we found some really terrible reviews about them and we were just really hesitant.  So nope.

Another referral we got a couple of years ago we reached out to and since the pandemic, he is no longer doing remodels and then ghosted us.  His loss.

Finally, we found a good one.  He wrote up a proposal for us.  He came out twice to measure, take photos, meet with us, etc.  When he asked our budget, he said we could tell him or let him come up with an amount so it didn't look like he was just going with our highest amount.  He gave us his best guess and it was a little less than the high end of our budget we had in mind.  We were OK with that.

Of course, he still had to work up numbers to come up with an actual proposal.  He came out another weekend and measured more and we even gave him a folder with some ideas of things we had in mind that we liked.

This is kind of what the plan was.  A complete gut and remodel on the inside and removing the addition and replacing it bigger and better.  Of course also a new roof, new plumbing, new electrical, new septic, an enclosed foundation, new windows, central HVAC, etc.  

Two weeks later he came back with the proposal:

About $75,000 HIGHER than our highest end budget.  The general thinking on a remodel is to allow an overage of about 20% for unforeseen problems, expenses, changes in plans.  With an amount like that, we could be easily be almost $100,000 over our already large initial budget.

To top it all off, now the interest rates are higher and on home improvement/remodel loans they are really high.   Most big city banks are hesitant to do remodel loans on rural properties.

What we've also found this year, through this journey of ups and downs, is that many contractors compensate for being so far away from a larger city by giving a higher amount.  They'd rather just stay around the area where they are doing other projects.  That limits the contractors in the area that are willing to do it.

We weighed the pros and cons and it would just be too much for a remodel.

In the end, we realized that if we paid this large of an amount, we'd still just have a remodel when done with inherit potential future problems.  That same amount could give us something brand new.

This house is where we will move permanently and work from home/retire.  We want it to be our forever home and we aren't getting any younger, ha.  So, we have scratched off the remodel and now we're either going with a new build or a new prefab of some sort.

We have an appointment with a builder next week.  We are also going to be visiting a modular home manufacturer in a few weeks and then hope to go to a pre-fab log home builder in North Texas when the weather is nicer.  Then we'll decide which way we go!

We want to get out there and start enjoying ourselves...and this should be the year that we get the big step of a livable house out there.