$10000 is a lot of money

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Posted by Jim on May 4, 2007 78 views

We finally broke down and went out to contractors for bids on getting the addition done. I have a very good idea of what needs to be done

redo the full bathroom upstairs
tear down the florida room’
rebuild the florida room open to the kitchen and at the same level as the kitchen

Ã‚Â Now on the nice side, its a few additional things

tear down the garage - its what the florida room attaches to, its foots are in the same quality and it just needs a do over
rebuild the house to the existing side of the florida room / garage
rebuild the house to the front lines of the main part of the house
rebuild the house to the back lines of the main part of the house
match the main roof in pitch so it just looks like one roof

Now that creates a void over the garage, and that opens up a few possibilities

Add a 2nd full bath
make the thrid bedroom on that side into a master bedroom with a bath and a walk in closet - this gets us a master bedroom suite, 2 additional bedrooms, and a total of 3 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths
or, make a 4th bedroom - that gets us a hour that is now 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths

So with those ideas, we asked for bids. One wanted $4,000 to bring in an architect and give us prints - absurd. Another wanted $90,000 for all the work. A bunch of others never replied and one was friendly, discussed what we wanted, and was informative. And his prices matched our plans. He bid on the bathroom remodel, the demolition and build out, finishing off the new 2nd floor area, and finishing out the new full bathroom. Immediately i said lets do the bath remodel and then work on what we want. Funds change, and we said lets just do the entire edition.

Ã‚Â We called the builder back,Ã‚Â and said lets go ahead. How do they want to proceed. So he came out, walked around with us, and said he would be back with an architect. We said fine, and a few weeks later, they came back. The architect was knowledgeable, had a nice chat with us, and then left.Ã‚Â A week or two later they came back with prints. And finally Anna was able to see what we were going to do. And some things changed

Originally I figured the small extension on the back of the house / garage would be gone and the line there would be even with the house. The builder suggested keeping it, and having a small bump out roof from the 2nd floor edition over the garage. The architect turned that into a line going all the way to the roof, and in that space put the 2nd full bath and a walk in closet
We were unsure about being able to do it, but wanted to try and add a pantry off of the florida room. The builder said yes. The architect said yes. When he came back he had it there and it looks great, including a step down, vinyl or tile flooring, a door into the panty and a door into the garage, shelving all around. A huge walk in pantry and a mud room area coming into the house from the garage. The only downside to this is it needs the roof over the florida room to rise quicker then the main house pitch. While I wanted all the roof to be the same, this has resulted in a small 3 or 4 foot vertical wall over the new space to accomidate room vertical space.
A 4th bedroom seemed like a nice possibility. The builder said it might be possible, or sure it is. The architect took my idea of making the 3rd bedroom closet into a hallway and went way better. He took the existing bathoom and made that into the steps up and a large closet space. And put the new bathroom entirely inside the 4th bedroom making it even more of a master bedroom suite. Even if it is massively huge it is still over 700 square feet of new space.
The current middle bedroom is small. I had figured it was what it is. The builder never mentioned it. The architect came up with moving a wall, building a new closet area, and taking our current bedroom 1 into something just a few square feet smaller, but adding a few dozen square feet to the smallest bedroom.
I had never thought of this, and neither did the builder. The architect suggested making the new 4th bedroom suite even larger by stealing 2 feet from the existing bedroom 3 which is a good 16′ x 16′ in size. Not only is this nice, but since the wall is currently an outside wall that has to come down, this really adds no costs and makes the master bedroom suite bigger.

So when they left last week, we got left a set of rough or working prints, which clearly show what we want and that it is possible. The builder wanted to finalize the deal last week, I told him to go back and redo his numbers. He figured it would be about the same. I said go back and redo the numbers and put it in writing.

So today he comes back. Our prior $70,000 turned into $114,000.

So enough with the sticker shock, how did he come up with that?

Well he added $5,000 for a 2nd heat / AC zone in the new space — I don’t think this is necessaryt, as we over sized the current system whenÃ‚Â we replaced it just 3 years ago.
And he figured another $7.000 to move the closets and walls around — this is suprising, since I would think I could do this today, and call the handymen out to do it for a couple hundred or a thousand.
He had to add a charge per square foor for the extra space over the garage but out, which wasn’t there in his mind, and in mine wasn’t even ther eon the ground floor.

Now we was supposed to be here early, and called three times to move the time around. And as expected, I had to do work, and took 3 different phone calls, 2 of which were support calls, while he was here. He was probably annoyed by that, but thats what you get for showing up during the day when someone works from home. And he was less suprised then Anna that the price jumped up so much, and wanted to know how to back it down, or alter his numbers. Can we paint the walls? Do we need hard wood floors in the 2 new rooms when every other room in the house is hardwood floors already?

Here we sit, in the same house, with a paper showing exactly what we want. The house what we paid for it 6 years ago would sell for the price we paid plus all the work we want. In today’s market. And that does not include the uptick from the house moving from a 3 bedroom, 1 and 1/2 in Bellmawr, Nj to a 4 bedroom, spacious master bedroom sweet with private bath and walk-in closet, 2 and 1/2 bathrooms, beautiful kitchen, florida room, breakfast area, dining room, walk in pantry and mud room entrance, 1 car garage.

But that still doesn’t mean Anna and I are ready to spend that extra money. Care to donate to our Build a bigger house in Bellmawr, NJ fund, you are more then welcome. Till then, the project will have to go on hold for another bonus at work or two. or the room starts to collapse even more. Thats the rough part of this, the work needs to be done, but very little of it has to be done. Except for the first item on the list - redo the bathroom floor.