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Official Pit Home Improvement/DIY thread

Anyone bought an old (~1930) home and done a full renovation? Currently looking for a new house, and it would open up a lot of potential options for us if we were willing to renovate, but I don't have a good sense of how much it would cost. Is there a good rule of thumb to use? If for example was looking to knock down walls, full new kitchen, new bathrooms, etc?
 
We had a 1920's home for our first place. There are definitely lots of questions to ask and things to explore. If not, you can spend a fortune. The charm of an older home is hard to beat. They also, from what our contractor said, tend to be built better than current homes.

- Lots of older homes may not have insulation in the exterior walls. Depending on the climate where you live this could be an issue.
- Exterior windows can be a big source of air leak and lost heat/cooling
- Closet space can be a real pain in small house.
- Knob and Tube wiring can be a real pain to deal with. A total re-wiring of the house can get expensive fast and it's sometimes hard to find an electrician interested in tackling the project.
- Depending on your climate the house may not have air conditioning. Our place in the VA mountains had only heat. We sprung for heat pumps because it was just too hot to live that way long term.
- you can spend as much or as little as you want on bathrooms and kitchens. we found bathrooms came in under 10k (obviously depending on finishing touches). Kitchen more in the 15-20k range.

Good luck
 
Good advice above.

A few additional thoughts.
You may need new water piping and/or sewer pipes. Black iron/cast iron pipe can be effectively much smaller than you might guess because of corrosion or deposits.
The wall studs will probably be full 2 inches by 4 or 6 inches and rough cut. Not the 1-1/2 x 3-1/2 you can buy today. Also, because "1/2" inch plywood isn't actually half inch, using a strip of plywood won't quite make up the difference. You may need to rip 2x6 to get what you need to match.

Walls are probably plaster over wood lath. It is hard to match thickness with modern drywall. And even harder to find guys who can do plaster. So be careful if you make holes in the walls.

The walls won't be flat. You may need a deep scan stud finder to locate studs under the plaster. For such purposes as hanging new kitchen cabinets.
 
I was under contract on a 1,800 SF condo in a building built over a hundred years ago. Inspection came back requiring over $50k worth of work on the electrical, walls, floors, and windows.
 
Anyone bought an old (~1930) home and done a full renovation? Currently looking for a new house, and it would open up a lot of potential options for us if we were willing to renovate, but I don't have a good sense of how much it would cost. Is there a good rule of thumb to use? If for example was looking to knock down walls, full new kitchen, new bathrooms, etc?

Bottom line: I'd expect 100k to upgrade electrical, upgrade plumbing, add A/C, replace/upgrade furnace, redo baths and kitchen, redo floors(?) And make other livability changes.

If you remove any decorative molding, do it carefully so you can reuse it. You will be lucky if you can find anything to match. Maybe you can get some custom made.
 
demo starts today on our renovation. Depending on how much you're doing yourselves and what kind of quality you're ending up with, $100k sounds low for a whole house reno.
 
demo starts today on our renovation. Depending on how much you're doing yourselves and what kind of quality you're ending up with, $100k sounds low for a whole house reno.

I feel like there's way too many additional questions/factors here to be able to roughly estimate...we've done 2 major renos on our current house (bedroom+master bath turned into big closet + big master bath) and finishing an unfinished basement, and both were more than the estimates I see above, so it HIGHLY depends on what your level of finish will be. But we also live in Northern Virginia where everything is nice and expensive!
 
I feel like there's way too many additional questions/factors here to be able to roughly estimate...we've done 2 major renos on our current house (bedroom+master bath turned into big closet + big master bath) and finishing an unfinished basement, and both were more than the estimates I see above, so it HIGHLY depends on what your level of finish will be. But we also live in Northern Virginia where everything is nice and expensive!

i love the show but Fixer Upper is such a fraud when it comes to the budgeting
 
We did a renovation approximately 25 years ago that included new master bath, several walls removed/placed, lots of electrical work, total interior painting, whole house floor refinishing, creation of new 1/2 bath, all new kitchen appliances, kept/painted the old cabinets but replace the counters, new fixtures in all bathrooms, built in shelving, etc. Spent about 80k.


Next time we decided to buy something new or already renovated.
 
I feel like there's way too many additional questions/factors here to be able to roughly estimate...we've done 2 major renos on our current house (bedroom+master bath turned into big closet + big master bath) and finishing an unfinished basement, and both were more than the estimates I see above, so it HIGHLY depends on what your level of finish will be. But we also live in Northern Virginia where everything is nice and expensive!

Yes. There are many variables associated with a major renovation of a nearly 100 year old house. My experience was from nearly 50 years ago, bringing a 1923 house up to 1970's livability. Cost number I threw out was just to help adjust thinking to 6 figures of cost, not 5.

Some things that helped: a local sawmill/lumber yard that would make rough cut full size 2x4 boards for replacement wall studs. Local hardware store that had useful stuff that fit the old stuff. Half inch plywood that actually was 1/2 inch thick, not 15/32. Place to buy both base coat (brown coarse) and finish coat (white, fine) plaster to do patch work. Not fun, but it looked a lot better than drywall.
 
Also worth noting is we had design/build firms do both of our big renos, so obviously that makes them more expensive. But our bathroom won awards for the designer at that company that year!
 
websites where they have an individual tile/picture/link for each color/finish for each sku should be illegal
 
Looking for some opinions here. In the new house we're building, we want to have a pocket dog gate (30" high) between our mudroom and our kitchen. Right now the wall is framed for an actual hanging pocket door. I think that causes a problem because the only way I can think of to do this is a rolling door on wheels, using the pocket as support, and when it's closed all the way, you latch it closed like a pocket door. However, because the pocket depth is for a real pocket door, I think when the door is closing more and more, you'll start to have a ton of wobble and it might even want to just come out of the pocket entirely. I don't want a floor rail because that would look awful. Anyone have any thoughts?
 
Could you make a custom pocket door that would remove the upper portion but keep the frame so that you could still use the same hardware as a standard pocket door?
 
google has some slick solutions. Saw this pic:

Secret-Gate.jpg


and this one:

built-in-doggie-gate-DIY5.jpg


built-in-doggie-gate-DIY3.jpg


built-in-doggie-gate-DIY2.jpg


i think a wheel is you're cleanest bet.
 
Could you make a custom pocket door that would remove the upper portion but keep the frame so that you could still use the same hardware as a standard pocket door?

I thought about that, don't think my wife would go for it.

Wheels are definitely the way to go, but I'm more worried there won't be enough support from the pocket side when its fully extended as you pull it out and it might just angle itself out of the pocket. Our builder says he thinks he has a good solution though, so we'll see what he says tomorrow. I was also thinking we just ignore the sliding pocket door and instead just leave a small space the mount a mesh retracting gate since those don't take up much space either.
 
You may be able to install some hardware on the sides of the top part of the doggie gate and some horizontal rails inside the pocket at gate top height inside the pocket to give added stability.

I like your idea of a wheel on the bottom maybe two would be better.
 
Just have to show off our new kitchen with all of the cabinets in. That dog gate will hopefully be going across the door in the back right to the mudroom!

2019-03-27.jpg
 
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