Al Heavens is a Haddonfield, N.J.- based, nationally syndicated, home-improvement writer and author whose newspaper columns, magazine articles and books have been the first word on remodeling for 50 million readers for more than three decades. He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home and Remodeling On The Money: Fifteen Innovative Projects Designed to Add Value to Your Home, and was “The Gadgeteer” on Discovery Channel’s Home Matters program.
If you take anything away from the following exercise, it should be “expect the unexpected.”
So here goes.
Among home buyers, whether they are first-timers or trade-uppers, there is usually an overwhelming desire to put their personal stamp on their new surroundings, to do something that says, “This place is mine.”
Sometimes this is not immediately possible, since, when you add the down payment to the closing costs to everything else, there is only enough money left for a gallon or two of paint.
Homeowners should realize two things: they should hold off on any major changes to the structure of the home in the initial months of ownership, and, when they decide to make changes, they should expect the unexpected
Delaying gratification is not such a bad thing. Unless something needs to be fixed or replaced immediately – the furnace or the roof come to mind – I usually recommend that buyers live in a house six months to a year before considering a renovation project and calling a contractor to discuss ideas and solutions.
For example, when you first move in, you might think you have plenty of storage space, but after a few months, you find what you have is woefully inadequate and you begin looking for enough space for another closet or even two.
At first, it looked like a dream kitchen, but then you began noticing some flaws – not enough lighting or difficulties in food preparation – and you conclude that changes are in order.
Experience is a great teacher … well, that’s the polite way of saying familiarity breeds contempt, and if you can avoid hating the place you fell in love with because of some correctable flaws, find a way to do so.
So, you have lived in your house for a year and you think you have accumulated enough knowledge about it — and disposable income, of course — to consider making changes.
Are there flaws that will make the renovation project difficult and more costly, problems that the home inspection did not uncover, and the sellers had successfully hidden?
More often than never, there are such flaws. Older houses can be full of them, the result of aging, neglect, pest infestations, and bad judgment by homeowners who decided, unfortunately, to do it themselves.
Here is an example: I owned a house with a wraparound porch, common at the turn of the 20th century. It was hidden from the street by shrubbery and trees that served no purpose other than to block sunlight from the living room.
I hacked away at the shrubbery and removed some scraggily trees, revealing a porch that probably looked much as it did when it was built in 1906.
There was, however, a hole in one of the fascia boards. Fortunately, there was an excellent carpenter who lived on the block, and I hired him to replace the fascia board, which was to cost $150 and take a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, when he put his awl into the board, it continued unhindered through the beam and out the other side. The carpenter removed the fascia board to reveal that a rotted beam, rather than being removed and replaced, had been mortised to a new one, and both were now like wet Swiss cheese, and the point at which they had been mortised was sagging.
The carpenter was a solo act, and the job required a firm that specialized in this kind of work, with the final cost reaching $1,000 in 1988 dollars ($1,201 today). The source of the water causing the rot were pinhole leaks in the never-maintained flat terne (lead-tin alloy) built-in gutters.
I chose to repair and then coat the terne gutters with a product called Tin-O-Lin, which is a linseed-oil based primer that takes anywhere from two days to two weeks to dry, which means you pray for a prolonged drought.
The more-expensive solution was to remove the tin gutters, extend the roofline, and hang aluminum gutters, which is what my neighbors chose to do for $5,000 more.
The point, of course, is to expect the unexpected when embarking on a renovation project. If you ever watch This Old House or Maine Cabin Masters, you see examples of this virtually every week.
I am not saying that the home inspector should have known about the porch (this was the early days of that business, so there were few professional standards), since the damage was hidden, and even when the fascia board was visible, what was behind it was not apparent until the carpenter plunged his awl into the wood.
I am simply saying that often the knowledge of your house that you have worked to accumulate falls woefully short of encyclopedic. Expect the unexpected.
A couple I know moved into a Philadelphia rowhouse – one of those “trinities” that requires shape-shifting to negotiate the stairs – and were looking for expansion space, but did not have lots of money to spend.
Somewhere along the way in the 150-year life of the house, an L-shaped addition was built — a kitchen, with a narrow hallway leading to a powder room.
The addition was covered with ugly asphalt shingles, and there was a small wooden shed shoehorned into a tiny space between the top of the “L” and a courtyard wall.
The couple hired a contractor to renovate the hallway and the powder room, hoping to add cabinets and a washer/dryer as well as to modernize the bathroom. They also wanted to remove the asphalt shingles.
The contractor walked out the door of the addition and pulled off a couple of asphalt shingles, disclosing extensive termite damage to the wooden addition, as well as evidence of rodent intrusion. The wooden shed, another victim of termites, fell apart when he opened the door.
Before the contractor could begin the interior work, all the exterior problems needed to be taken care of, including removing and replacing the exterior walls after an exterminator came in to deal with the termites and mice. The couple wanted brick to replace the damaged wood walls, but the cost of the project would have tripled, so they settled for stucco.
Expect the unexpected.
There is a myth that I found myself perpetuating until I actually began doing my renovation projects 40 years ago, and it has to do with quality of workmanship in the “good old days” compared with today.
You often hear people say, “They don’t build houses like they used to,” and I immediately breathe a sigh of relief in response.
Today’s materials are vastly superior to those 50 or 100 years ago. They also meet established building-code standards that did not exist in the olden days.
Time after time, I would try to replace some piece of structural lumber that was cut to whatever width the ancient contractor felt like using that day, which meant that I would run a larger width through a table saw to make the slightly narrower width I needed as the replacement.
Just as important, there are rules that builders and contractors follow, and these are strictly enforced, through regular inspections, by municipal building officials.
I was replacing a fascia board that had been chewed by squirrels. When I removed the compromised board, I found several pieces of what appeared to be large wood scraps behind it.
I asked the carpenter down the street about it.
“In the old days, workers would make wrong cuts, and were required to pay the contractor for any waste,” he said. “So, they would hide waste behind walls, beneath floors and, in your case, behind fascia boards.”
Expect the unexpected.