anyone taken on a fixer-upper house? was the experience...

[butters]

one you'd never wish to live again? rewarding? exciting?

find anything fab or creepy? body parts or treasures?

come across any hidden issues, like rotten foundations you didn't know about?



is it something you've never done but want to try?

 

[jaF0]

I'm not sure most would classify this place as a fixer upper. Concrete block and wood built in '47. I've replaced all the windows, wiring, plumbing, added siding and insulation, new metal roof, refinished floors ......

All done myself, no contractors except part of the roof I couldn't handle due to the slope.

Found lots of wood rot, insects and other problems.


Bought it in the late 90s and still doing things.

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

Money pit. TV is the only place it goes reasonably smooth and close to budget and they find hidden treasures. In real life it's thousands and thousands over budget, there's no such thing as hidden treasure and has caused more divorces and broken friendships than anything else.

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

I'm not sure most would classify this place as a fixer upper. Concrete block and wood built in '47. I've replaced all the windows, wiring, plumbing, added siding and insulation, new metal roof, refinished floors ......

All done myself, no contractors except part of the roof I couldn't handle due to the slope.

Found lots of wood rot, insects and other problems.


Bought it in the late 90s and still doing things.

Next summer I'm doing new siding and a metal roof. Long overdue.

 

[Escierto]

My daughter and her husband buy houses, live in them and rehab them then sell them. They usually make a couple hundred grand per house. Of course some of that represents their labor but they do very well. I know several other people who do this also.

 

[butters]

I'm not sure most would classify this place as a fixer upper. Concrete block and wood built in '47. I've replaced all the windows, wiring, plumbing, added siding and insulation, new metal roof, refinished floors ......

All done myself, no contractors except part of the roof I couldn't handle due to the slope.

Found lots of wood rot, insects and other problems.


Bought it in the late 90s and still doing things.

i think it qualifies! even if it took a lot of time.

doing it all yourself is something you can be proud of *nods*

this place is over a hundred years old now and it's been an ongoing case of additions and renovations ever since H's parents bought it back in the 50's (think it was then). don't believe we'll ever really come to the end but then that's part of the beauty of it all. H's mum added a couple of rooms and H had another big slice added, more than doubling the original footprint, as well as having the massive workshop and the double garage built outdoors. Most was done by people the family knew but there's stuff H did all around.

 

[spacekowboy]

My advice would be that if you aren't a carpenter or have worked in the trades, don't bother.

 

[butters]

Money pit. TV is the only place it goes reasonably smooth and close to budget and they find hidden treasures. In real life it's thousands and thousands over budget, there's no such thing as hidden treasure and has caused more divorces and broken friendships than anything else.

you must watch different programmes than i do, since i'm regularly surprised at just how much over budget they go and just how awful some of the problems are that they come across. never seen any of them come across money-value treasures but plenty of interesting pieces of artistic merit.

My daughter and her husband buy houses, live in them and rehab them then sell them. They usually make a couple hundred grand per house. Of course some of that represents their labor but they do very well. I know several other people who do this also.

have they any memorable tales, or has it just been mundane, dirty, boring work that turns a profit in the end for them?

 

[butters]

My advice would be that if you aren't a carpenter or have worked in the trades, don't bother.

or have very helpful friends/family who have the knowledge...

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

My advice would be that if you aren't a carpenter or have worked in the trades, don't bother.

This.

I'm a reasonably good weekend carpenter and have done more than my fair share of wiring and plumbing but I'd drown in a real fix er upper.

 

[jaF0]

Money pit.

That was a remake of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

That was a remake of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

It was. Both were pretty accurate.

 

[rae121452]

i've been living in fixer-uppers since about 1980. this is the 4th that i've lived in, there were also four that i used as rentals. never found anything spectacular, just a lot of animal bones, rodent nests, TONS of coal dust and illegal wiring. one building had been originally built as a hospital and it wasn't even haunted. it's a great feeling when the job is finished but the parts like showering in the basement, finding a rat infestation and freezing your ass off in winter aren't a whole lot of fun. i'm debating moving into another that i've already completed and had a tenant in for a few years, it's a lot nicer than the one i'm in now.

as for the rotten foundation part-one house had a kitchen floor that sloped. when i pulled up the flooring to find out why, it turned out that the whole one end had rotted out. there was only a crawl space about a foot deep underneath, everyone told me that i'd have to tear the entire end off and start over. i had an old 1950's car jack and i used it to lift each beam back into place and while it held it i repaired each one. it's still holding so i must have done something right.

 

[spacekowboy]

or have very helpful friends/family who have the knowledge...

Even then, unless you're willing to pay them a commensurate wage they are accustomed to for their help, I still wouldn't bother. Friends and family can feel they are being taken advantage of. Ive seen too many friendships and relationships fall apart because business got involved

 

[Cubantripod]

I used to flip houses for a living at one point. If your goal is that you want to live in it, then sure. You don't have a strict budget you have to adhere to in order to make a profit. In a case like that, it can certainly be rewarding. You're turning something old and decrepit into something usable and you're doing it.

if you're doing it to earn a buck, you need to be a little more careful. You have to make sure the house is structurally sound, or you will lose your shirt. Then even the interior repairs have to be within reason to stay within your budget.

 

[coati]

I prefer building from scratch. Old houses tend to reflect an era when fossil energy was "too cheap to meter". When you build the right way from scratch, you can reduce your long-term energy costs and carbon emissions enormously. Also, naturally cooled and heated houses are quieter and more comfortable.

I've done some retrofits, but they were costly and never turned out as satisfying as designing for the 21st century.

 

[dolf]

We probably doubled the property's value within 18 months.
The only people we brought in were the plasterers and the guy who tiled two of the floors.
I put down the laminate flooring, he stripped and sanded, rooms got painted at midnight when we both had to work.
His sexy friend, who finds outdoor physical labour therapeutic, did much of the landscaping graft topless, for a few quid and plenty of bbq.
A genius idea was the "paving slabs free to anyone who wants to pull them up" advert.
The worst of it was definitely the flooring. A rabbit hospital had been run from the house, and I'm sure people can imagine how grim tearing up the old carpets and lino. There were creatures breeding behind the skirting boards.
He single handedly removed a concrete driveway and replaced it with deep gravel while I was at work one day, shifting several tons by hand.
The biggest expense... Possibly the plants for the garden. We created an, almost instant, mature, tropical garden. A fabulous garden adds much to the value of a property.
The only hidden treasure was a solid, polished granite floor under the ugly bathroom lino.

It's worth it if you have the skills.
He's a perfectionist, with inhuman physical strength and a steady hand.
I'm a master of destruction, unsurprisingly, but also pretty good at construction.

If you don't have the skills and physical strength, it's going to be an expensive way to increase your stress and reduce your bank balance.

 

[HisArpy]

One of the houses I own was a repo and it had problems. The worst being mold in the wall from a broken sewer standpipe in the kitchen. Someone shoved something into the cleanout and broke the cast iron wall of the pipe.

So, total kitchen redo plus the plumbing repair and mold remediation - $10K with me doing all the work myself and getting a hell of a deal on the cabinets.

It needed a redo of the master bath, the shower pan was leaking, plus everything else in there new. - 15K with me doing all the work but I upgraded and enlarged the shower at the same time.

I also removed a wall between the dining room and the living room. That required I put in a hefty beam to support the roof where the wall was - $5k.

HVAC duct work, new flooring, paint, this and that... I'm about $50K out of pocket into the house. I'll double my total investment (mostly due to the low purchase price and increased equity) but I'll never get back the true cost of my labor.

In the end, for me, I'll probably never do it again. It's a young man's game if you DIY. If you don't then you need to be the guy paying the crew's wages rather than having a contractor paying both their wages and making a profit.

 

[GothTalk]

I'm no professional houseflipper or anything but I've had a few and even made some money along the way.

Most were not bad at all, and I got a great deal/made good money just cleaning the place up and doing a little landscaping while I lived in it for a few years.

One in particular however was a comedy level money pit and pain in the ass.

It's the one I live in now and we only went through the struggle because it's THE house we wanted.

My S/O and I got an old (it was built in 1897) Victorian that was originally used as a funeral home/mortuary until the late 1920's and has almost 8 acres of no longer actively used old cemetery next to it that used to be part of the original property but now belongs to the county. Then got passed along until we got it. Long story short "renovations" uncovered layer after layer of problems and it ended up being a total gut, strip and rebuild that took over two years longer and a good deal more money and headache than expected. In part due to creepy haunted house scaring contractors scared of ghosts, a horrible problem that made us smile.

But in the end the fight was worth it as we got our "Addams Family" dream house and are now petitioning the country for a family plot on the family plot.

 

[oggbashan]

My brother did three houses in succession.

The first was a 1930s semi-detached house that had not changed since it was built. He had to replumb, change the kitchen and bathroom and rewire before decorating the whole house. It wasn't in a bad state, and structurally sound, just very very dated.

The second was a large double-fronted 1920s house that had been a doctor's surgery for twenty years. They had only used the downstairs. The pair of staircases had been cut off and two doors inserted halfway up the walls. he had to rebuild the staircases and renovate all the bedrooms while converting what had been the waiting room and doctor's' offices into living rooms and a kitchen. The front garden, seen by the patients, was immaculate. The back garden was a jungle and overgrown. He hired an Allen Scythe and set off down the centre of the garden. he hadn't gone far when he lost the Allen Scythe into the swimming pool he didn't know he had...

The third house was a real challenge. it had been built in the 1630s and for forty years had been used as a boarding kennel for dogs inside and out. The garden was covered in wooden sheds and all the interior rooms had been partitioned to make dog houses... The dairy outbuilding had a twelve-foot high pyramid of used dog bones, tossed in through the window opening on the first (upper) floor. The ornate chimneys, weighing seven tons, were swaying in the wind. the house was in danger of collapsing into the cellar. One of the kitchen walls was bulging dangerously.

His mortgage lender wouldn't consider loaning even half the purchase price until my brother spoke to his uncle - then General Manager of that institution and got a two-thirds loan. Within a month the chimneys had been fixed, parts of the cellars filled with concrete to stabilise the whole house, and the kitchen wall had an RSJ above a missing wall that had been replaced by two layers of plastic sheeting.

His farmer neighbour brought a bulldozer to clear the garden before a twenty-foot high bonfire of broken wooden sheds was lit. Then my brother found he had an operational well and a goldfish pond in the garden. The dog bones went for fertiliser.

Gradually he worked around the lowest floor ripping out partitions and making good. In the main living room, there was a cracked 1930s tiled fireplace. He ripped that out to reveal an ornate Victorian cast iron fireplace. When he had taken that way he found Georgian fire dogs. Behind them?
A much older open fire with spit roast fittings.


In the kitchen there had been an Edwardian cast iron solid fuel cooker, cracked and leaking. Behind that was an inglenook fireplace in which he burnt some heavy logs to keep out the cold coming through the plastic sheeting. Above the fireplace was a WW1 rifle wired to the wood. A few months later the village policeman dropped in for a cup of tea and noticed the rifle. he examined it closely to find that not only was it fully operational but it had a full load and even a cartridge in the chamber. All the ammunition had been degraded from decades of heat rising from the cooker. I replaced it with a legally deactivated rifle.

Upstairs one of the bedrooms had a wattle and daub wall that had been badly damaged by the partitioning for the dogs. he had to make wattle and daub to repair that himself. In another room, a wall had been lined with thin and buckling plywood. Behind that were religious paintings from the 1630s - now listed as historic relics. He had to replace the plywood with glass and install temperature and humidity controls.

Eventually, when he had finished, instead of a falling-down house with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, he had an immaculate Grade Two listed mansion with nine bedrooms and five bathrooms and the dairy had been converted into a one-bedroom maisonette.

All three renovations had been done well within his projected budget, mainly because of his own skills and that of his friends who would come for a week or weekend to help out - including an architect, a surveyor, and two electricians.

 

[discreetman2019]

I'm no professional houseflipper or anything but I've had a few and even made some money along the way.

Most were not bad at all, and I got a great deal/made good money just cleaning the place up and doing a little landscaping while I lived in it for a few years.

One in particular however was a comedy level money pit and pain in the ass.

It's the one I live in now and we only went through the struggle because it's THE house we wanted.

My S/O and I got an old (it was built in 1897) Victorian that was originally used as a funeral home/mortuary until the late 1920's and has almost 8 acres of no longer actively used old cemetery next to it that used to be part of the original property but now belongs to the county. Then got passed along until we got it. Long story short "renovations" uncovered layer after layer of problems and it ended up being a total gut, strip and rebuild that took over two years longer and a good deal more money and headache than expected. In part due to creepy haunted house scaring contractors scared of ghosts, a horrible problem that made us smile.

But in the end the fight was worth it as we got our "Addams Family" dream house and are now petitioning the country for a family plot on the family plot.

Any good ghost stories regarding the house?

 

[Chernosoth]

I prefer building from scratch. Old houses tend to reflect an era when fossil energy was "too cheap to meter". When you build the right way from scratch, you can reduce your long-term energy costs and carbon emissions enormously. Also, naturally cooled and heated houses are quieter and more comfortable.

I've done some retrofits, but they were costly and never turned out as satisfying as designing for the 21st century.

While materials are still cheap. As energy prices rise more, so will materials.

 

[coati]

While materials are still cheap. As energy prices rise more, so will materials.

Material costs are already going up. I'm glad I built my house when materials were still relatively cheap.

I'm doing some remodeling jobs now in my neighborhood, and used materials are a big part of keeping costs down. Like, every time I find a batch of used rigid foam insulation at Habistore or a thrift store, I snatch it up.

One current job for an older couple is rodent-proofing and insulating the crawl space below their mobile home, which happens to be oriented with the big exterior length facing the south. They are filling that crawl space with rocks gathered locally, and I am installing used windows on the south-facing wall of the crawl space to heat their home for the winter.

Another job involves "outsulating" a cement block house built in the 1980s. I picked up a load of used styrofoam and bought new Tyvek house wrap and surplus stucco wire and stucco trim from Habistore. The sand for the stucco is mined from a nearby wash.

Passive thermal design can still be employed, even if you mainly have access to used materials.

 

[oggbashan]

I prefer building from scratch. Old houses tend to reflect an era when fossil energy was "too cheap to meter". When you build the right way from scratch, you can reduce your long-term energy costs and carbon emissions enormously. Also, naturally cooled and heated houses are quieter and more comfortable.

I've done some retrofits, but they were costly and never turned out as satisfying as designing for the 21st century.

My brother's third house - see post 21 above - had three-foot thick masonry walls and small inset windows with internal wooden shutters. The roof was timber-lined and felted under heavy clay tiles. It was warm in winter and cool in summer. He heated it with originally oil-fired central heating until the gas main got to the village a decade later when he switched to gas. But for most of the time, a single wood-burning stove in the main living room was enough for a massive house. The wood came from his own woodland.

The separate dairy had had nine-inch brick walls and a corrugated iron roof. When finished it had an inner layer of insulation blocks, insulation lining under the plaster, a properly timbered, lined and clay tiled roof, double glazed windows, except on the North side, triple glazed, and was kept warm from the Aga cooker that also did the hot water.

 

[coati]

When finished it had an inner layer of insulation blocks, insulation lining under the plaster, a properly timbered, lined and clay tiled roof, double glazed windows, except on the North side, triple glazed, and was kept warm from the Aga cooker that also did the hot water.

Ogg, the key here in the desert is to insulate the thermal mass on the outside of the house, not the inside. Thermal mass either holds heat or holds cold for long periods of time. You can use it to your advantage, not only in the desert, but also in temperate or cold climates.

Remodeling fixer-uppers is still usually focused more on aesthetics than on energy conservation. However, once a customer realizes they can save thousands of dollars in utility costs each year, they are more willing to consider "outsulation" of high-mass walls or high-mass thermal storage. Also, more customers are recognizing the need to reduce carbon emissions.

With a high-mass house insulted on the outside of the mass, you can go through a power or fuel outage for days and still have a reasonable temperature inside the house.