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Originally Posted by vash13
Hey Revscene. I know this is more about real estate and not renovations but there seems to be more traffic on here. Here's my story.
I am moving into my condo in kits after purchasing and renting it out right for 3 years. The building is 2001, about 800 sqt ft, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a den/storage room in the unit. The wife and I want to do some renovations to it before moving in and we are not sure what cost is ideal to do the whole apartment from bathroom, kitchen and living spaces and rooms, which is our ideal bucket list. We are both working professionals and work about 10 hours a day so in terms of renovating the place ourselves it's just not cost effective for us because of the nature of our jobs. We have been given two quotes so far by two contractors and one "seems" on the low side and one is quite high. Low end about 40k and high end 70k-80k to get what we want done. Our ideal time living in the apartment will be shortest 5 years middle 8 years and max 10 years depending on kids and extra space needed. The place does look dated and want to make it look fresh for us to be excited to come back home from our long hours of work.
Any advice or idea would be appreciated in terms of what is a good reno estimate that is cost effective for us to live in an updated apartment that we are satisfied and also how much is too much money to put in and not make any profit when we sell the place to purchase something in the future.
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I did something really similar at around the same time last year. We bought an old townhouse (1200sqft) and it need work and we spent around 40k including materials and new appliances. We hired a handyman that's been doing house work for us for over 10 years. I'll give you some idea of the break downs, appliances cost around 10k, and materials was around half the rest of the cost iirc.
We redid:
Master bedroom washroom (tub, sink, cabinets, tiles, basically everything)
Kitchen - everything except for cabinets (counter top, appliances, floor, faucet, backing tiles, etc)
We pulled all the carpet, put flooring in the living room, 2nd and 3rd bedroom and hallway. Replaced the carpet on the stairs and master bedroom. Redid the fireplace facade. Replaced all counter tops. All new baseboard heaters and floorboards. Added lighting in living and swapped out all the old light fixtures and got all LED bulbs.
Other interesting non-standard things was we dug out the back wall of the laundry closet because it was designed for condo sized units. This allowed us to put in full size units. The laundry room was also using vinyl flooring, so we put in tiles. We also filled in two windows that were quite frankly, useless.
We saved lots of money by painting the house ourselves. The handy man quoted around $2-4k to paint the whole house. We instead just paid for paint and did everything ourselves. Plus I was OCD and insisted on sanding down all the old paint before painting.
They brought in "experts" in wherever they can't do the work, such as counters and carpets. They had contacts where we got decent to good deals. We used synthetic stone for all our counters and it came up to around $2200 including cutting and install (the installer said it's more durable especially in the kitchen, and cheaper). Carpets was $1800 for stairs and master bedroom.
We picked and picked up most of the items ourselves and had it in the house ready to go for them, which saved money. 2 car loads of flooring (48 boxes from store on Bridgeport Richmond), all the toilet pieces except for the glass door(home depot) and tub(Lowes).
They gave us their accounts for some of the places which obviously saved money as well:
Flooring in Richmond
Sherwin Williams for paint
Olympia Tile (Willingdon)
After typing all that out, I think we obviously got a good deal with a guy that we trust. If you trust that handyman to be able to do a good job and get you deals etc then I don't see why the handyman is not the way to go. only thing I didn't like was it took almost 3 months to finish everything, which was a little too long.
Side notes:
Garbage is expensive because the garbage type needs to be separated(dry wall, tiles metal, wood etc), which wastes time. Taking the garbage to collection costs money, and driving there costs gas and money.
Older building plumbing really sucks.
If you want to put in flooring when it used to be carpet, make sure the strata is ok with it. My strata had regulations on the standards which underlayer we use had to meet.
My handyman only worked 10am - 6pm because he said he's received complaints at many places about noise.