We Are Go For Renovation!

Answering your questions about our upcoming whole-house renovation

Photo by Milivoj Kuhar on Unsplash

Wow, last time I wrote about the renovation on this Substack was back in January! I’d gotten feedback suggesting I put more of the reno content on Instagram, which I did, but I might have taken that a little too far by not concurrently posting anything here. I’ll try to be better about sharing in both places!

Since that last post, we finalized our plans with our architect and, in the first week of April, submitted for permitting. Two months later - faster than we’d dared hope - our renovation was approved by the city!

We’re currently preparing to move out of our house next weekend, which will give us a week to sell or donate anything we don’t want to store before demo starts on June 23. (Because we’re moving in with my parents for the duration, we don’t need to have access to most of our stuff besides personal effects. We’re renting a storage unit instead. Expect another post soon about what we’re keeping and why, which has been a real process of discovery for us as individuals and as a couple!) When I asked our contractor’s project manager how long the renovation might take, she said “Six months… so let’s say eight to be safe.”

We’re not gutting the whole house, but we are tearing down and rebuilding the back on both floors, finishing the basement, and reconfiguring the second floor in addition to putting in the first HVAC system this house has ever seen. This question that a friend left on Instagram is totally fair:

How did you decide how much to take on? It seems to balloon when you talk about it.

To the second part: yes… and also no. The idea was always to start with a whole-house plan and then see what we could move to a hypothetical Phase Two because we knew our budget wouldn’t cover the entire thing.

Unfortunately, though, there really is no way to phase the structural work. The only way to lower costs is to change decor plans (like not wallpapering our primary bedroom in grasscloth, which was my dream), use less expensive materials (like porcelain tile instead of marble in a bathroom) and/or leave some aspects of the work unfinished (like putting in the hook-ups for a kitchenette in the basement but not actually installing anything there). The economy isn’t super stable right now, so that will impact how much we can afford to do, too. We won’t know exactly how until we’re further into the work.

How are you paying for this?

I’ve been super transparent about the fact that we had help from our parents in buying this house in the first place, so this question is also valid. We started saving up for this renovation as soon as we closed in 2018, and it’s being financed about 40% from savings and 60% through loans.

Is this your forever home?

Probably not, but we’re not going anywhere while Robbie and Claire are at a school we can walk to from home, so we’ll be here for at least five years after the renovation’s finished. We aren’t renovating for resale!

That seems like a great segue into all the decor questions I got - including the “how do you avoid decision paralysis?” one - but this post is already long enough, so stay tuned, dear readers.