So you want to remodel?

I guess this is more of a renovation reality post than anything else. I probably have a few random pics of progress but honestly I've been too busy working on the house to take many and now I'm too tired to find them and post them here. It's a sad sad truth but there you have it. I feel like we're maybe in the home stretch but even that is questionable. I suppose that out of the things that are left, we could possibly do all of them ourselves or hire a few random people so all in all we feel a little more in control. Here is a list of things that still have to be done.

• Put approximately 12 shingles on part of the roof that got overlooked. The shingles are here and sitting in the driveway.
• Put vinyl siding on the side of the chimney that couldn't be done before because A: The chimney guy had to come and fix the flu, and B: They ran out of siding to finish it anyway. 
• Paint. OMGEEEEEE at the painting. Now we actually had someone give us an estimate on this but holy cow, I can paint to save three grand plus the cost of paint. It's a LOT of painting, let me just tell you that. #ICantPutMyArmsDown
• Add crown molding (where applicable) and baseboards to the remodeled areas. 
• Add interior doors to the new areas
• Add flooring (the cost of this made me wanna hurl and we didn't even pick really expensive stuff)
• Have the electrician install the plugs, switches, and lights (it's part of his original bid)
• Have the new front door installed (it's ordered and I so hope that it's as epic as we hope it is)
• Have the insulation guy do the blown in insulation in the attic (you know, since there's drywall now to hold it up)
• Have the HVAC guy hook up the new unit in the master
• Random other trim fixes, hardware installs, touch ups, etc.

There may be other things to add to the list but I can't think of them right now. At the current moment, we are only signed up to do the painting but we theoretically could do most of the things on that list. Eventually. If we had to. But we reeeeeally don't wanna.

So here comes the part of the post where I list things that you should really know if you're thinking of adding on or hiring people for a major renovation.

• You should go to your local codes department and ask them the basic standard procedures for getting permits, requesting inspections, scheduling inspections, inspection order (like which one comes first), and if they have any suggestions on contractors. You might even consider pulling your own permit and sub-contracting a contractor in case you have to fire him since all of the other permits are pulled/linked to the main one. 
• Consider putting something in the contract that says if they go over their allotted amount of time by more than X weeks, they have to start deducting $X off the final bill (which you pay in installments- very important fact there) for every week they go over.
• Accept that it's going to be way more expensive than you think. I know you get estimates and there's always something that comes up, blah blah blah. I watch HGTV so I knew about that and we had extra money on top of the contractor's extra money and it's a good thing because we're gonna be over budget at the end. You find that you make small changes along the way when your house is totally torn apart. You'll have the following conversation: Well, we've been wanting to do that and have plans to do it so why don't we just do it now since everything is wide open so that we don't have to tear it up again. 
• Accept that it's going to take way more time than you thought. There will be delays like weather, illness, another job ran over (that's a BIG one), something got back ordered, something arrived broken, something was broken after it arrived and now they have to order a new one, something is out of stock and you have to repeat the painstaking process of choosing another one, something is going to be waaaay more expensive than you thought and you have to repeat previous line, your inspection failed for some random reason and you have to fix it and have it reinspected, and the list goes on. 
• Accept that in order to afford those really cool upgrades that you wanted and stay anywhere in the general vicinity of your budget, you might have to buckle down and do some of the work yourself. you have to consider your strengths in this. For example, I'm not skilled at hanging doors and I'd rather paint than hang trim, so I'm paying the trim guy and doing the painting myself. I'm probably not that great of a painter either, but it's what I've got. 
• Tell your boss or your clients or your kids that you'll be semi unavailable for the next undetermined amount of time. 
• If you are going to put yourself in a position similar to ours, be prepared to eat a bunch of take-out or quick meals at the coffee table before scrounging through a laundry basket for a clean towel and some underwear so that you can take your tired paint covered ass to the bathroom and get a shower before you drag your exhausted self to your inflatable bed to pass out for the night. You should also add money to your HSA to cover all those chiropractic bills due to the strain that you're putting on your body from working and sleeping on said air mattress. You should also kiss your love life good-bye because by the time you actually go to bed, you're too tired to do anything else and let's face it, air mattresses aren't really made for that kind of action. No, that is NOT how or why our first one broke. If it were, I would fess up to that because it would have made a hilarious blog post. 

So there you have it kids, that's how my days are going. I have managed to regain use of my dining table which has made life infinitely more tolerable. We are scheduled to wrap all of this up within the next two weeks if there are no more delays. Remember that line in The Money Pit? Two weeks, two weeks? Yeah, it's like that. I'll post a follow up post later to let you know if I think it was all worth it. ~Kellie~