I just read an interesting article in the New York Times: “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Solvent“. A couple purchased a 1913 Tudor brick house for $65,000 12 years ago in Akron, Ohio. The home is amazing (before and after photos included in the article) with 6 fireplaces, solarium, billiards room and servant call buttons. The couple offered the owner 45K less than the already reduced asking price. The offer was accepted because the house was about to be condemned.

They tackled the majority of the restoration work themselves, saving a considerable amount of money in the process. The couple has no debt except for a 55K mortgage. It is an interesting comparison to people who purchased more house than they could afford and are now feeling the pinch.

The restoration, still ongoing, is not without personal sacrifice. One of the things that I have struggled with during our ongoing house restoration is the loss of personal time, family time and trying to strike a balance between working on the house and “having a life.”

When asked how long projects like re-caulking 733 window panes takes, the home owner replied:

“Years,” Mr. Giffels says. “This is where I’m glad I wrote the book 10 years later, it gave me a perspective of all the time it cost: All my vacation time, all my possible spare time, a number of years of my children’s growing up I gave to my children’s house. And once you get in it, you can’t get out, you can’t sell a house in that condition. When all of a sudden you realize what it is costing you in your life, it’s too late.”

Boy, I can sure relate to that sentiment. How about you?

Although, after reflection, the couple says they wouldn’t do anything differently. And, I understand that feeling, too.

A book, “All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House,” recounting the couple’s experience comes out next month.

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   What Would You Have Said? What advice, caution or encouragement would you offer to a young family taking on a house restoration
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We just celebrated our 5th year of home ownership last week. We are a little over halfway done with the house. What a journey this restoration project has been! We often receive questions about buying and restoring an old house. So, on the occasion of our anniversary with homeownership, here goes…

Would we do it again? Hmmmm. Halfway through our restoration I started to have fantasies about building a completely Modern house, something that you would see on the pages of “Dwell” magazine, where everything would be brand spanking new and streamlined. A few months ago I would have said NEVER. EVER. AGAIN. But, you know what they say about never saying never. 

What have we learned from our experiences? If you are going to restore a house with someone, have a conversation or two about how you actually plan to accomplish this before buying the house. When we talked about fixing up the house, I imagined us lovingly working on it together. I had no idea the images floating around David’s head were of us interviewing general contractors…lovingly together. What can I say? We were young, in love and not so focused on the details. It never occurred to me that David wouldn’t “like” working on the house. 

Things will cost so much more than you expect and take much, much longer than you imagine.

Know your limitations. Sometimes it is much cheaper and safer to hire someone than to attempt to do a project that you have no skill or aptitude for. Hire a licensed electrician, plumber, roofer, or foundation contractor.

It is just a house, just a paint color, just a piece of furniture, just a light fixture, or just a kitchen design. Try to keep things in perspective. If only I could have all those hours spent pouring through magazines, books and eBay back. I spent way too much time, and probably too much money, on things that seemed important at the time but, in the bigger picture, maybe they don’t matter quite so much.

If I could do it all over again.
1. I would spend more money upfront and purchase a house in the best condition that I could afford. We thought we would save ourselves money by purchasing a fixer and we were worried about house payments. We ended up spending MORE money fixing our house up than if we had bought the nicer, more expensive house.

2. You will save yourself so much money and frustration if you find a house with unpainted woodwork, if that is important to you. Stripping paint is a horrible, horrible process. It is not fun, it is not exciting…it is hard and expensive work.

3. Get to know your potential neighbors. We were lucky that we ended up with great neighbors. If I had been smart, I would have knocked on some doors and met my future neighbors before we bought our house. In my neighborhood, there is not much that happens that my neighbors don’t know about. Your potential neighbors can probably give you the lowdown on the owner of the house, the other neighbors, who or what you should watch out for, and probably some history about your future house.

4. I will not live next door to an apartment complex. We saw some really great houses but didn’t make an offer because they were next to 2-3 story apartments. I like to live next to people who own their houses and have more invested in their upkeep. Plus, I don’t want people to be able to look out their windows and have a bird’s eye view of my backyard.

5. Look for homes that still have intact original features such as moldings, beamed ceilings, hardware, original wood doors, light fixtures, wood framed windows with wavy glass, etc. The more original features the better. Yes, all these things can be added back if they are missing but it is costly – especially to put back wood framed windows.

6. Make sure you get a thorough home inspection, but be prepared for surprises. The home inspection won’t turn up all the problems in your house. Until you take a room apart and put it back together again, there are things you just won’t find.

7. Spend time in the area. Drive around and get out and walk. Is this somewhere where you want to live? Do you feel safe? Make sure you like the block before you buy a house on it.

8. Be patient. It takes a long time to fix up an old house and a good amount of money. Try to be realistic, although, if you have never fixed up a house before, it is hard to even know what is realistic. Here is a hint, most of what you have seen on tv about fixing up a house is not reality. It occured to me the other day that it took our house almost 100 years to get so run down, so why did I think it would be completely restored in a few months or even a few years?

9. After you buy the house, invest in an alarm system and take the burglar bars off the windows. Alarm window screens are completely worth the money.

10. Nothing will change the look of your house like a good paint job!

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   What Would You Have Said? What advice, caution or encouragement would you offer to a young family taking on a house restoration

Since then I’ve managed to stick a rocking chair through the screen and also ruin the door jam. Everyday the tear in the screen seems to get bigger because now the animals have become accustomed to using that hole as a pet door. The screen door also frequently gets stuck in the door frame when the handle is locked and the door is slammed shut.

So after months of procrastinating, I’ve decided it’s time to finally restore the Restoration Realities screen door. The first thing we have to do is find a new screen. Heather has always wanted a copper screen in the door, and we’ve tried to find it locally but with no luck. So recently I did some searching on the internet and was able to find a copper wire mesh at Metro Screen Works which we will be ordering next week.

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I remember the first time I saw Lulu. It was about 8 years ago at the pet store. Heather had seen her there previously and thought she was the wierdest looking puppy she had ever seen with short legs, big paws, big ears and a missing tail.

I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to get a dog but after driving around and talking about possbile pet names we decided to go back to the pet store to see her again. I asked one of the pet store employees if they could take her out of the cage and they handed her to me. She was so tiny and her fur was so soft. You could just tell that she had a great little personality. Lulu won me over and we took her home that day. She became a part of our family.

Lulu was the sweetest dog with such a great personality and calm demeanor. I used to take her to work with me everyday and she would just hang out in the office and contently lay by my chair as I worked. She was much loved by everyone who came in contact with her because she was so quiet and well behaved.

She loved to go on walks at the beach and at Runyon Canyon. She would always go on ahead a little bit then stop and look back making sure we were following her. She would also herd us together nipping at our heels making sure we stayed together as a pack. Lulu’s been a big part of our life. She was there through the wedding planning and she was at the door and happy to see us when we returned from our 2-week honeymoon in Tahiti.

Lulu was with us when we moved from our apartment to our house. She’s been through all the restoration process living with us in the sawdust and giving cheer to all our various contractors. Lulu also got to travel with us over two different holidays – one year going to visit my parents in snowy Utah, and another time she got to visit the farm in Indiana.

She was always so sweet, happy and healthy. That’s why it was such a shock to us to find out Thursday night in the animal critical care center that she had a tumor that had burst and was bleeding into her abdomin. Lulu was even just at the vet a few days earlier because we thought she might have back problems and there was no indication then that there was anything else wrong with her.

Thursday night Lulu went into shock because of the tumor and the doctor said that her vital signs were so low they were worried that they might not be able to keep her stabilized through the night for emergency surgery the next day. So we were faced with a decision that we didn’t want to make: either try to put her through surgery and see if they could remove the cancer cells and to see if the cancer had spread, or to put her to sleep.

Surgery is no guarantee which we have found out in the past putting one of our cats through two major surgeries trying to remove a cancerous tumor – which turned out to be unsuccessful. We didn’t want to put Lulu through all that pain and suffering. She was such a sweet dog. So Thursday night we made the hardest decision to say our final goodbyes as she gently fell asleep and through the tears I whispered in her ear “We love you baby girl”.

We miss her so much. The house isn’t the same without her.

Lulu, we love you.

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It has finally sunk in that we don’t have the stamina to have house projects going all the time, one after another, lets hurry up and get everything done so our house is restored all ready. Our what seemed realistic at the time plan, the one where we complete all the work on our house within five years? It’s now the 10 year plan or the hopefully we get the house done before we die plan. Considering this is our fourth year in the house and we are barely halfway done, I think the new plan is a good call.

We have decided that completing one project a year is a more realistic pace for us. Although, it would have been nice to have restored the kitchen and our main bathroom before we hit upon the one-project-a-year-for-a-more-balanced-life approach. I think it is going to be a while before I have the ever changing kitchen of my dreams.

January
My dad came to visit and finished some plumbing work he had started the year before. This culminated with hooking up the sink in our downstairs half bath. It only took us 3 years to actually have water running out of a faucet in one of our bathrooms. Yeah!

February

The episode of “Restoration Realities” featuring us aired on the DIY television network. Along with the show’s host and carpenter we built a period appropriate screen door and weather stripped our windows and front door.

Heather + Dave on Restoration Realities Part 1
Restoration Realities Part 2
Restoration Realities Part 3
Restoration Realities Part 4

March
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

April
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but may have scared a very nice sounding family away from the idea of restoring a rundown Craftsman home of their own.

May
Did absolutely NO work on the house. Starting to see a theme here?

June
Did absolutely NO work on the house.

July
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but I finally resolved the ownership issue of the oil and mineral rights to our property.

August
Finally, some work on the house! Stripped the woodwork and doors of the stairwell, landing and upstairs back hallway. I purchased leaded glass French doors from the early 1900′s off of eBay for the upstairs back hallway.

September
I publicly confess that I have resentful feelings towards the house for the first time. I think I used the word “hate.” And, in certain moments I do hate the house. There, I said it again. We are at an odd point in our restoration experience. The honeymoon period with the house is definitely over.

Maybe this is normal? Maybe around year 4 of an extensive restoration project everyone starts hating their house a little bit, or at least all the time, money and energy that goes into it? After all the work on our house year, after year, after year, we are barely at the halfway point of having our home fully restored.

It’s not like I hate the house all the time. It comes and goes. There are moments when I also love our house. Most of those loving moments are spent in the completed portion of the house.

October
We discovered that the upstairs sleeping porch, a 1918 addition, was inadequately framed. I’m not sure if inadequate is a strong enough word to describe opening up a wall and discovering two 2×2′s as the sole support for a load bearing wall. Shocking comes to mind, so does what the hell were they thinking, quickly followed by I wonder how poorly the rest of the sleeping porch is built?

Pablo rebuilt the wall and installed the leaded glass French doors.

November
Ah, November…November was a month chock full of resentful, or maybe even hateful feelings. There was a lot to hate.

Getting right to it, we both hated the color I selected to paint the stairwell and hallway. I was going for silvery sage but ended up with baby nursery mint green. We received alot of wonderful paint color suggestions, but in the end decided to go with a blue green color that matches the original 1912 wall color of our bedroom.

This leads us to the most mysterious occurrence that has happened during our entire restoration process. Two weeks after the woodwork was stained and sealed with several coats of varnish the woodwork faded. Drastically. Overnight. We have no idea how or why this happened. It’s so unbelievable. I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible? We are hoping that someone out there might be able to provide an answer.

December
Our stairwell and back hallway project is completed. One more down, seven major projects left to go…

Lulu and Winston underneath the Christmas tree

David and I spent a quiet Christmas in our little bungalow, just the two of us.

Looking forward to 2007!

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1. 2005 Year In Review Taking a look back at our bungalow restoration project
2. Hallway & Stairwell (almost) Finito! Walls patched and painted, wood stripped and stained
3. Wide Open Spaces We try to decide if we should enclose our hallway?

It is so easy to spend money, more money than you ever intended, when restoring an old house. I recently faced this fact yet again while looking for period ball tip door hinges. I found them for $28 a piece at an antique hardware store. Considering that we needed 9 hinges, that would have set us back $252.00 plus tax for DOOR HINGES.

I found the same hinges for around $20 a hinge at a salvage yard. I love historical accuracy as much as the next restoration buff, but there is no way I can justify dropping that kind of dough on a door hinge. Reproduction hinges would have cost around $150 plus shipping and handling.

eBay is usually a great resource for finding old house parts at reasonable prices, but doesn’t always work well when you are looking for larger quanities (such as 9 matching hinges).

What to do, what to do? Hot foot it over to our local big box store and drop $48 for modern hinges. We could have purchased them for half that price except that I insisted on the more expensive bronze finish.

Is it period perfect? No. Will anyone even notice the difference? Other than every member of the local historical society, I doubt it.

I subscribe to the more bling for your buck restoration philosophy: Keep expenses down where possible and invest in one special item that has “wow” factor.

With all the money we saved on the door hinges, we had enough money left over to buy an antique doorknob and lockset for the French doors. Double wow!

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Juan, for whom we have great affection and hold in the highest esteem, has gotten really busy. We are still waiting for him to come back and repair a minor detail on some work he did for us over 2 years ago. We are now working with Juan’s nephew, Pablo, and he is awesome! Pablo, his brother and their friend have been coming on the weekends to do work on our house.

Pablo and his team have patched and skim coated the plaster walls.

The paint stripping is almost complete – just little touch ups needed here and there.

We have doors again!

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Buying The House – Are We Really Doing This?
Gee, I can’t believe we are actually going to do this. What if we want to move to another country someday, you know, like next year? Are we sure we really want to do this? 235K is a LOT of money. Oh my God, I can’t sleep.

I can’t believe we have to go through all this paperwork just to buy a house.

What happened to our house? Why does the house look so different now that we own it? It looked so much better at the open house. Why didn’t we notice that the floors are all black and the house is so dirty? Wow, just look at this place. It’s kind-of dumpy. Make that totally dumpy. I can’t breathe. I need to open a window. Oh crap, all the windows are painted shut.

First 6 months – Euphoria and Unrealistic Expectations
I can’t believe we finally have a house to call our own. I’m so happy. Oh, what a beauty it will be someday when we get it all fixed up…like in 6 months from now. Hmmmm, it does need a lot of work. Well, maybe in 8 months then. This place just needs some tender loving care.

Man, we are so busy all the time now. It is hard to stay in touch with friends and family. All this unpacking, looking at paint chips, trolling eBay for antique light fixtures, reading everything I can find on bungalows and home decorating really takes a lot of time.

How romantic that our second wedding anniversary is spent together in our own little home. I’m so lucky to have a husband who is as excited as I am about starting our very first restoration project. I love my husband. I love our house.

The Rest of the First Year – All That Glitters is not Gold
I can’t believe that David is acting so mean! Why did we even buy this house if he is going to get angry at me every time we work on it? How could I know that stripping paint would be so damn difficult? It’s not my fault that I caught the wainscoting on fire. The heat gun got super hot.

We should be able to restore the dining room in a month, six weeks tops.

2nd Year – Reality Creeps In
I can’t believe we are STILL working on the dining room. How could we have spent six months working on one room? I can’t believe I actually thought we could restore a room a month! I was so naive. We might need to get on a five year plan.

I had no idea it would be so expensive to fix up the house. How did I think we were going to be able to restore the whole house with 15K? I mean, our house needs EVERYTHING. Why does everything cost so much?

All the cashiers at Home Depot greet me by my first name. We gotta get out more. I mean to someplace fun. I can’t even remember the last time we went out to dinner or to a movie.

Wow, our house has really appreciated in value and we have only been here a year. Interest rates keep on dropping. Lets refinance and take out a Home Equity Line of Credit so we can afford to get our roof fixed and to hire some plasters.

David started a web blog about the house for me. I’m not really sure why. I mean, what could I possibly have to say?

3rd Year – Restoration Full Steam Ahead
I can’t believe how awesome these plasters are! They can do everything. They can strip paint, plaster, do carpentry work and so much more. I think I’m in love! With the money we got from the Home Equity Line of Credit we should be able to swing lots of work on the house. Everything is going so much better now.

All my free time is spent on the house. I’m trying to schedule the carpenter, plumbers, electricians, oversee all the work being done and balance the budget. It really upsets me when these people don’t show up or even bother to call to say they can’t make it. What other industry does business like that?

David is refusing to talk with me any more about what colors to paint the house. Just because I change my mind once or twice a day, and maybe I am being obsessive, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. I need to consider all the possibilities and all he wants to focus on is the end result.

Wow. The back porch needs to be completely ripped off and rebuilt. Our little back porch project has somehow spiraled into a full-on exterior restoration. This is crazy. I don’t think we can afford this.

Good thing interest rates are still low, but everyone says they are going to rise. Lets roll our Home Equity Line of Credit into a fixed second mortgage and take a little extra cash to finish up the work on the exterior.

It’s hard to remember how horrible our house used to be. I’m feeling really good about the house. It’s so exciting to see my vision for it coming to fruition.

4th Year – Maybe We Should Sell?
I can’t believe that we have spent all this time and money and are only half way done. I hate this house and all it’s problems. I am SO over working on the house and all things house related. I will never, ever take on a restoration project this extensive again. I must have been out of my mind!

Wow, the house across the street listed for over 600K and it needs lots of work – like our house needed lots of work when we bought it. Maybe we should sell? We could travel or move to Europe.

Hmmmm, I’m getting really bored. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to do some work on the house? It was really nice of David to clean out the back hallway so I can start restoration work upstairs.

5th yr – Who knows?

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We recently received an email from a couple considering buying a house that sounds like it would need a good amount of work. I wanted to be supportive and encourage them, but I also felt that I needed to be honest about our experience. I’m left wondering if I just ended up scaring them away?

I question if someone had told me upfront what I was in for if I would have wanted to go forward with the house? Who am I kidding? Of course, I would have still wanted our house. I would have assumed our house would somehow be different, our experience would somehow be easier. Kind-of like when David tells me that the screaming child having a fit at the mall because he wants a cookie is an anomaly, that if we ever had children they would never act that way.

Fellow house restorers, what would you have said? Do you have any advice, caution or encouragement for someone considering undertaking a fairly extensive restoration with 3 young children?

Email:
Subject: Should we do this crazy thing?

Hi Heather!

We came across your site when doing research into a 1912 bungalow located in Southern California that we are considering buying. It has always been our dream to buy a Craftsman home, and we found this one and can’t believe how beautiful it is. We have three small children who would have to live through a major “cleaning up” of the house, and we have spent the last week stressing about all of the pros and cons of buying it.

Your site has only added to our problem with this big decision. It looks like a LOT of work, but you sure do look happy doing it! The house we are looking at needs tons of work and is WAY overpriced. I guess the days of buying a fixer upper at a fixer upper price are long gone. Our question is, would you guys do this over again if you had the choice? Do you think your type of remodel would be doable with kids in the house?

Thanks so much.

My Response
Hi!

Thanks so much for contacting us. First of all, I have to say that I am glad that we got the house. After 3.5 years I feel like I have some perspective. There is nothing like bringing a house back to life and these old homes are so special. When we get our house done I am sure I will think it is all worth it.

That said, this process is much more difficult than I had imagined when we first purchased the house. The main thing I didn’t realize is the amount of time it would take. I don’t just mean the amount of time it takes to complete the projects, I also mean the amount of time it takes away from your “normal” life. The first year we were in the house we didn’t go out to dinner, movies, see friends, watch tv (ok, we watched less tv) or all those little things people do without giving it much thought. Yes, we could have still done those things but it is so hard to enjoy time away from the house when you know there is so much to be done just to make your house livable. In the beginning it isn’t so bad because everything seems like an adventure and is still fun.

I also didn’t factor in the amount of dust and dirt these projects generate. We had 2 shop vacs going around the clock and plastic partitions up to try to contain the mess but it doesn’t really help all that much. Be prepared to have a layer of dust covering everything you own no matter what you do.

Then there is the money. In our case we grossly under estimated how much the work on the house would actually cost. A little bit of money spent here and there really adds up quickly. In our experience, you can start out doing a little project and as you get into it, you discover a structural problem or a plumbing problem. You delve into that problem and find something even more expensive behind that. The whole one step forward two steps back has led me to tears many times.

The best way I can explain it is to think of the house as a child. A very demanding child with special needs. Because that is the kind of focus and dedication the house will end up requiring. The house does add strain and takes the focus off your primary relationships. Because you are so busy working on the house you aren’t able to give your other relationships the same amount of time and energy as before the house. There is a constant level of strain. There have been times when I am washing the dishes in the bath tub, taking a shower at the gym or going to the Laundromat for months because of a plumbing issue when maybe I would rather come home, kick my shoes off and relax. But, I can’t kick my shoes off because everything in my house is covered in dust. It’s that kind-of thing for months or even years on end that just gets to you.

Then you get to where we are now. We have the house basically livable. But, we still have lots left to do and I can’t get geared up to go through all that again. I just want to live in the house and enjoy a semi-normal life. I don’t want to deal with the dirt, dust, energy and cost that I know will come with more work on the house. We’ll get to the point where we will work on the house again but we haven’t worked on the house for over a year and it’s very hard to get back into it once you stop.

I hope I haven’t scared you completely away from the idea but I am trying to be as honest as I can be. Personally, I would not go through a restoration as extensive as this one again unless we had the money to bring in a team to do the work and complete the project in 6 months – before we moved in. At the time we bought this house, I think we would have been better off finding a Craftsman house that was in better condition and spending more for it. We ended up putting that money into fixing this house up anyway.

But, it has been rewarding and we are now at a place where we can enjoy the house. I just wish that the house was completely done but we still have lots left to do. Even though we have done all this work, we are only half way there.

You have to go with your heart. There is nothing that anyone could have said that would have stopped me from buying this house. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. It hasn’t been easy and I do think it would be even harder with young children unless there is a way you could bring in help to get the work done quicker.

I hope this was helpful. I wish you and your family all the best!
heather

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See Part 3

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