Remodel .net

Remodeling Tips, Contractors & Vendors

In an uncertain economy and with interest rates near historic lows, many home owners are remodeling. With fewer homes being built, many homebuilders are now taking on remodeling jobs they wouldn’t have considered.

“Many people are trying to do things just to survive the down times,” notes one builder. Custom home builders are still building custom homes, but not as many. Remodeling projects are buffering the bottom line. A few years ago, builders weren’t remodeling.

When it was easy to flip a home to add a bedroom, now remodels from $3,000, $5,000 all the way up to $125,000 are becoming common.

Word of mouth is leading homeowners to call homebuilders for remodeling.

This may be a good time to get a good deal on a remodeling project from a hungry homebuilder.

Consumer tip for getting the most out of your contractor: Study the plans and cut longitudinal and transverse sections out of the design to arrive at the most pared down version of your plan. Since so much of the cost of construction is calculated by the total area (square foot) of materials involved, negotiate your best cost for construction on the smallest total area. You may elect to complete the drawings based on the smallest acceptable area or develop a second set with your ideal total footprint. When bids are returned on the smaller set of drawings (with specifications — recommended) sit down with the builder with the most reasonable bid and inquire, for example: “If we add x feet here and y feet in the following areas, how will this affect the total cost?” Typically, the extra built area will not add a proportional cost to the total bid. The result is more remodeling for your money.

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Beloved Muppet Kermit the Frog once crooned that it ain’t easy being green. Think how hard it is to remodel in an ecologically-friendly manner when your supplies are wood, stone and chemicals.

The Chicago Sun-Times provides a list of green-friendly remodeling tips:

The green light on going green
HOME REMODELING | Environmentally friendly advice to fix up entire home

If you’re planning on remodeling, now it’s easier to do it green.

The City of Chicago Department of Environment has produced six new guides to help homeowners remodel in ways that use less energy, improve air quality, minimize waste and recycle. Greater energy efficiency means cost savings, reduced pollution and increased comfort.

Kitchens

The kitchens guide covers flooring, appliances, cabinetry, countertops and tile.

It’s estimated that the average kitchen accounts for 20 to 40 percent of a home’s total energy bill. If your refrigerator and dishwasher are more than 10 years old, you can reduce your utility bills by replacing those old appliances.

Another money-saving trick is to size your appliances to your needs. The style of fridge is important too. In general, models with the freezer on top use up to 25 percent less energy than comparable side-by-side models. Models with through-the-door ice and water use more energy too.

New cabinetry can be the most expensive component in a kitchen remodeling. First, determine whether your cabinets need to be replaced or resurfaced, refinished or repainted. If space is the issue, there are ways to maximize what you already have. Increase storage by adding shelves within the cabinets. Pullout shelves can be added that allow you to retain the existing cabinet doors.

Baths and laundry

The baths and laundry guide explores energy-efficient and water-efficient alternatives for showers, baths, sinks and toilets.

Where do you begin? Define your priorities. Create a list of your most common tasks. Does the design make tasks easier? In terms of space, take an inventory of all categories of space: personal space, elbow room, storage space and floor space. Explore simpler solutions first, such as creating a grooming station in the bedroom to free up traffic jams. Or consolidate cleaning supplies in one area (that’s inaccessible to children, of course).

Building envelope

With the building envelope guide, you can learn weatherization techniques for your home. How to choose roofing materials, insulation and windows is addressed as well.

A home’s building envelope consists of structural materials and finishes such as siding, sheathing, windows, doors, roofing and other materials that prevent heat loss through air leaks.

For example, your roof has a tough job; after all, Chicago receives an average of 33 inches of rainfall and 3 feet of snow every year. Your roof’s ability to shed this moisture dramatically affects your home’s longevity.

Weatherization includes tightening up the building envelope by using caulk, foam and weather-stripping.

An adequately insulated home will provide energy savings and a comfortable environment. Homes that were built before 1970 have little or no insulation.

Painting

The topics in the painting guide include removal of old paint, color choices and low-voc (the least toxic) paints for family and house health.

A new coat of paint can brighten a home, but the painting process can compromise indoor air quality and even release toxic substances (such as lead from existing painted surfaces).

Six hundred million gallons of paint are used every year, according to the National Paint & Coatings Association. A significant portion is wasted through buying too much paint or improper storage. Some of this paint ends up being improperly disposed of, which threatens public health, wildlife and water quality.

Salvage and reuse

In salvage and reuse, you can learn about reuse opportunities in your home, including flooring, molding and cabinets as well as products made from recycled goods.

The City of Chicago requires contractors to recycle construction and demolition debris. Since March of 2006, more than 430,000 tons (or 90 percent of the material generated) has been diverted from landfills. Although home projects represent only a portion of the construction waste total, remodeling invariably results in a variety of items being discarded.

You can incorporate recycled items into your project. For example, you can find salvaged supplies for almost every building material. Especially in Chicago’s vintage homes, used building materials can temper the newness of a remodeling project while tying fresh elements to the existing home.

Hiring the pros

How to find green contractors or architects is explained in this section of the green remodeling guide.

For your remodeling project, your contractor will need special skills and experience. The ideal green remodeling professional will offer direct experience with a project scope similar to yours, plus plenty of knowledge for green concepts and practices.

Remember, you often get what you pay for when hiring a contractor. The lowest bid seldom turns out to be the best deal.

Download the complete series of green remodeling guides at www.cityofchicago.org/environment. Chicago Department of Environment, (312) 744-7606.

The best returns for your renovation dollar where payoff increases over time.

Money Magazine’s Josh Garskof asks:

If prospective buyers looked at your house today, what would they see outside? A giant evergreen that looks as if it might swallow the station wagon, perhaps, scraggly old foundation plants or maybe a kitchen-table view of the neighbors’ kids’ trampoline?

If so, you have a truly inexpensive opportunity to boost your home’s curb appeal.

By spending $500 to $3,000 on plants and materials and a few hours of time, you can achieve a well-landscaped look without shelling out for professional help.

Besides the personal enjoyment you’ll get from a prettier yard, landscaping adds more value than almost any other home renovation.

Project prioritization should depends on how long you think you’ll be around to enjoy the results.

Selling in a year or less:

1) Edge the beds

• Cutting fresh edges where grass meets mulch makes the lawn look well kept. A move as simple as curving the edge of your flower beds could increase the value of your home by 1 percent, says horticulture professor Bridget Behe, the lead researcher on the MSU study.
• Also, if your foundation plants are overgrown, widening the beds by two feet will make the shrubs seem smaller.

2) Nourish the grass

• For truly lush turf, ideally start regular fertilizer treatments a year before listing the house. Green up the lawn with just a single application.
• Spend $45 on a broadcast spreader, which quickly distributes fertilizer over a lawn, enabling you to nourish a quarter-acre lot in about 10 minutes.
• For a yard that size, expect each monthly application to cost about $20 (for straight fertilizer) to $30 (with weed killer).

3) Scatter color throughout

• For about $1 a plant, you can blanket your yard with petunias, impatiens and other small annuals that will flower throughout the current growing season.
• Also invest a few hundred dollars in some larger perennials and in shrubs that stand at least four feet high. “A few good-size plants have more sex appeal than 20 little ones,” says Chicago landscape architect Douglas Hoerr.

If you’re improving for the long-term

4) Cut back the jungle

• Many everyday yard plants, such as azaleas, forsythia, hollies and rhododendrons, will fill out with new growth after a season or so even if you hack them down to stumps, says Christopher Valenti, a landscape contractor in Lewes, Del.
• Be careful, though, of yews and junipers, which won’t grow new leaves on old wood and may need to be removed altogether if they’re severely overgrown.

5) Add drama with foliage

• A distinctive yard will make your home more appealing to buyers, says Los Angeles realtor Dana Frank. So replace plants that don’t flower, or provide interesting foliage with eye-catching alternatives, like a patch of blackeyed Susans, a flowering crabapple or a cutleaf Japanese maple.

If you’re planning to stay put, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars for big plants.

You’ll save 50 percent or more by buying small ones and waiting a few seasons to get the full visual impact (when planting, make sure to space them based on the mature size listed on the label, not how they look now).

6) Consider new angles

• Most yards have almost all the plants along the foundation and the property lines. But if you place yours throughout different parts of the property, you’ll create a depth of field that makes your home look farther away from the road, says architect Hoerr.
• Try putting some near the house’s corners to accentuate its shape, others near the street to define the yard, and some in between, where they can block unfortunate views and be admired from indoors. Many nurseries offer free design help to buyers.

7) Cover your rear

• It’s nice to wave hello to your neighbors out front, but the backyard should be a private space. If yours feels overexposed, fencing can offer a quick fix.
• For each eight-foot section, you’ll pay about $100 (for a plain cedar stockade fence) to $300 (for an elaborate Victorian model), plus another $50 to $150 a section for installation.
• You can also achieve the same effect at a much lower cost by planting small evergreen shrubs, although you’ll have to wait a few seasons for full coverage.
• Or, rather than pruning those hulking foundation plants (see humorous example, below!), hire a landscaper to transplant them along the property line. As long as they’re healthy and evergreen, it’s a great way to maximize the value of the plants you already own.

Take your home outside: An open-air “room” adds inexpensive living space that may come in handy at resale. And it needn’t have a price tag as big as the great outdoors.

One of the great pleasures of remodeling is the opportunity to upgrade your lifestyle.  Think of all the great things you can get with a remodel - more space, more luxury, more storage, better efficiency, better flow for entertaining, cooking etc.  Maybe even a super cool bathtub big enough for a grownup.  Unfortunately, some remodels just can’t deliver the goods.  Every once in a while you just need to take the money that should have delivered a super custom grill center, new deck and great seating area and instead sink it into something PRACTICAL.  Like a roof.

Now you might figure that living in beautiful coastal los angeles that I don’t really need a roof, and for 10 months of the year you would be right.  But unfortunately, in a wet year we can get a foot or two of rain.  So my wife says we need a roof over our heads.

 Until recently, that hasn’t been much of a problem.  You see, we were very astute shoppers when we bought our home a few years ago.  We picked one that ALREADY HAD A ROOF.  Feeling smart and smug, we’ve been getting along just fine with our old grey roof. 

  It’s so high up off the ground, you have to kind of squint to see it, and it’s always looked smooth and dry.  Until the winds came.   This April Los Angeles had several weeks of strong, hard winds.  (not florida winds, or kansas tornado watch winds, but good solid 45-50 mph winds roaring through like a freight train.)  Since my house sits on a ridgeline,  Easterly winds have a clear shot at my house.  Nothing to slow them down as far as the eye can see.  When the wind blows at my house you can feel it in your bones.  And this year, it managed to get under our skin.  Or at least under the roof tiles.

The next morning we started finding old grey roof tiles out on the sidewalk, in the street and down in the backyard.   For a day or two we pretended that it was somebody elses roof blowing away.  But soon enough we walked down the block, looked back up our hill and could see the gaping hole on the north slope of our roof.    No deck for me.  I was getting a roof.

(Okay, I confess, we
did put it off for a month or two to match better with my work
schedule.)

Step one on any significant remodeling job is to pick the right
contractor.  The first step is to make a list of who you know, and who you trust who can give you the best referrals.   Who’s done a similar project recently? Who’s in the business?  I’m lucky.  One of my friends owns a number of rental properties, and has always been able to recommend high quality contractors who price out well below the “retail” price.

After a bit of looking around, some preliminary estimates from other
contractors we chose his guy.  Easy to talk to,  the great eference and 50% of his normal retail price.   Now lets hope that what they say about low bidders isn’t true.

So here we are on a bright, sunny May morning, with 4 men on my roof, (well on what’s left of my roof).  There’s a truck in the driveway,  and
loads of old roof flying through the air going thunk.   

I wasn’t sure how to count it as a remodeling project, unless you consider it as the Big Guy remodeling a chunk of the Hollywood Hills and Los Feliz.  Nevertheless, I was up on the deck of my West Los Angeles house shooting photos of roofers putting on my new roof. (See - The answer is blowing in the wind - or at least my roof is).  I looked off to the northeast and saw towering columns of greyish smoke, a sure sign in LA of a spreading brush fire. 

Just as the sun started to set, the column of smoke started to glow orange like a scene from Exodus, and then you could see pillars of fire as the blaze crested the hills facing the Los Angeles basin.  I grabbed these few shots and a bit of video (i’ll try to post it in a while) as the flames raged around the Griffith Park Observatory.

This has been the dryest season in decades for SoCal.  We are seeing fires in May that wouldn’t be expected until the end of summer.  There’s a lot of brush up there so it looks like a pretty nasty fire season yet to come.

In an uncertain housing market, your best plan may be a remodeling project that addresses your needs.

Since prehistoric times, spring has been a time of rebirth, renewal, and the revival of a universal human lament: “We need a bigger cave.”

Or, at the very least, a more comfortable one.

Luckily for modern man, the climate for home remodeling projects this year has improved along with the weather. True, the real estate market slowdown has put the brakes on soaring home values, but many homeowners can still count on solid equity and decent interest rates to help them find financing, experts say.

With new home construction slowing, and people willing to spend less on remodeling, you also may find contractors who are more willing to tackle your project. They even may be more inclined to bargain, said Sal Alfano, editorial director of Remodeling magazine. “For the past couple years, it’s been hard to get a [subcontractor] to your house,” he said. “That has loosened up considerably. From that perspective, it’s an ideal time to do a project.”

Amid these signs of hope, caution remains. With the resale market slowing, homeowners may no longer enjoy the latitude to choose the most indulgent projects, remodeling experts say. Instead of installing that spa, you may be better off fixing the roof. Before you indulge yourself with a wine cellar, repair those drafty windows.

“A major capital expense is not something I would recommend, if you want to sell,” said Jeff Bollinger, a Realtor for Prudential Fox & Roach in New Castle County. “If you’re going to do that, plan on staying there a while. You wouldn’t get all that money out of it.”

In tighter financial times, it simply pays more than ever to choose your project wisely, fund it carefully and ask what will pay off in the long run. For folks who are ready to move up to a bigger home, such discrimination may help snag a buyer and sell at a good price. For homeowners who are increasingly being priced out of a tradeup, such remodeling projects can help keep them happy just where they are.

Ultimately, it might be the kind of real estate climate where you find remodeling is wiser than moving, experts say.

One of the most crucial realities to accept is that most projects are unlikely to produce a dollar-for-dollar “payback” in your home’s value. In some regional markets, homeowners can expect to recover 60 percent to 70 percent of construction costs for such projects as a home office or family room. In the Wilmington area, however, the rate for those projects is closer to 50 percent, according to this year’s Cost vs. Value report by Remodeling magazine.

In general, those “recoup” values have dropped to their lowest levels since 2002, the report says. Locally, the highest return rates are for the most practical renovations — siding, windows and roofs — but sellers can still see a relatively high rate of return for a new kitchen or bath, the report found. As fuel prices continue to climb, projects that boost energy efficiency — furnaces and windows — are increasingly wise.

The biggest challenge may be the oldest one — finding a contractor.

“I’m busy as all heck right now,” said Kyle Cycyk, owner of Complete Home Images in New Castle County. “I have roofing and siding jobs lined up until August.” Procrastinating homeowners can speed the search by using such contractor-connection Web sites as Service Magic.com, Contractors.com, ABC.org and AngiesList.com.

Finding the cash can be another tricky exercise. Financial planners discourage homeowners from tapping into retirement funds and caution against obtaining financing through the contractors. Home equity loans and lines of credit frequently offer the advantage of tax deductions for interest paid, but homeowners should be diligent in paying them off as quickly as possible, so that the equity will be there for you again.

Home equity lines of credit can also come with the threat of fluctuating interest rates. For longer-term loans, cash-out refinancing may be a better option, with some cautions. While a “refi” may offer lower interest rates, it also generally comes with higher closing costs and fees than a home equity loan. Using refinancing as a way to pay off remodeling costs can get expensive in the long term — it’s important to repay what you’ve “cashed out” as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, there are signs that upward pressure on some remodeling costs could ease. The price of lumber is expected to drop this year, and a study this month by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found the steady growth in home-improvement spending is expected to slow through most of 2007, possibly easing demand for raw materials.

On the other hand, costs of copper, drywall and petroleum-based products are rising, Alfano said. Still, he sees an upbeat outlook for homeowners willing to choose the right project at the right time in the right neighborhood.

“You might find some more favorable pricing now, because it’s a more competitive environment.”