Addition or New Custom Home

Should I add an addition or additions and renovate my home or should I tear it down and build a brand new custom home where the old one once was?

This is a question that I get asked a lot by people, especially these days with the real estate market being so tight and it becoming harder and harder to find homes/chalets/cottages. In our area we also have people deciding to retire and move permanently to the area, they have to decide if they can live in their chalet/cottage and can they make it a proper home which usually means making significant changes to it.

What this really comes down too is a matter of money.

If you can afford to build yourself a new custom home then you should do it, adding an addition to it and renovating the rest of the place should be a last resort.

Why should it be a last resort? Well if you remove the matter of money, then what you need to focus on is what you are giving up by just adding an addition;

• An addition is never as much space as you want it too be. There are many reasons for this but the main one is that you are adding more square footage to a side or sides of your current home, that basically creates two living spaces, the new addition and the old home.
• Usually when people are adding to their existing home its an older home. Older homes are a lot different in layout and the way that they used space then modern homes. Older homes are cut up with individual rooms, this makes the space harder to use and also makes the home feel smaller. Modern homes are more open with as little walls separating the rooms as possible. This gives the feeling of more space and also allows a space to be more of a flex space.
• Older homes require extensive renovations to be brought up to an energy efficiency when comparing them to newer homes. 
• No matter how you tie the new addition to the old home and rearrange the inside living space its hard to make the new addition blend in to the old home, it will never look like one continuous home, it will look like a house that had an addition added to it.
• So things in an older home are not easy to upgrade or re-furbish. Waterproofing around the outside of the home is one, to replace the waterproofing you are basically digging up the entire yard around the home.

No matter what you want to do it all does come back to money.

Renovating and adding an addition will always be cheaper then tearing it down and building a new custom home, but the the costs need to be put into context.

In today's real estate market a new home is going to be worth more money then an older home that had an addition added to it.

The renovation/addition is cheaper but is still expensive, you sacrifice a lot to save money and not as much as you think.

New custom homes are exactly what you want, in fact the new home could be smaller square footage wise but have more usable space inside. The smaller new home brings the price difference closer to the costs of renovation/additions with the added benefits that it is a modern new home.

Whatever you decide reno/addition or new custom home remember that its a lot of money not to get exactly what you want.

Rob Abbott

Great Lakes Custom Homes Inc.

Share Your Renovation Budget With Your Contractor

 Many a time I have been called to someones home or cottage and they tell me they are in need of renovations. Sometimes the renovations are major and sometimes the renovations are minor.

One of the questions that I ask these people is what is their budget for their project. I do this to help both of us,

1. It helps tell me if you can afford the renovations that you are proposing to me
2. It lets me guide the client to things that will fit in their budget.

Sometimes people will either ignore the question or tell me that they don't want to tell me their budget.

The reasons that they don't want to share this information varies widely but it does happen more often then it should.

When you don't share your budget with your contractor you might think that you are then getting a price that isn't set off the budget that you told them, its the same mentality that people use when talking to real estate agents. They tell the real estate agents that they want to spend a 1 million dollars on a home and the real estate agent proceeds to only show you houses that are between 1 million and 1.5 million dollars and never shows them the houses under a million dollars. 

Well that is not how it works in construction. In construction most contractors don't raise and lower the price depending on the budget. Most good contractors are estimating jobs all the time and don't have the time or the patience to make up new markups and prices for every single job that comes across their desks. They have figured out the cost of doing things and they know the mark up they need to charge to make a profit and pay the bills and that's how they price jobs.

Knowing that, what you need to understand is if you tell your contractor that you have a budget for $100,000 for renovations on your kitchens, bathrooms, living room and great room and they figure out the cost is $140,000 then they give you the choice of what you want to renovate for the $100,000. They don't ask you for more money they just help you renovate what you can for your budget. Its means that you might not get your basement renovated or maybe the kitchen. They adjust to fit your budget.

Contractors will work with your budget, they will help you spend your budget with the renovations that you can afford, if you decide that you don't want to spend the entire budget then they will adjust the renovations so that you save money. Maybe they recommend a less expensive tile in the bathrooms or the deletion of some cabinets to help you lower the budget.

Every contractor wants to do more work but they also want to get paid for their work, if they allow the project to go severally over budget they then risk you not having enough money to pay the final bill, nobody wants that.

When I meet with people for renovations I spend a lot of time talking them out of things that don't fit in their budget. I'm basically talking them out of giving me work, but they have shared their budget with me and that tells me if they can afford it or not. This happens a lot with people who want additions, they have underestimated what additions cost per square feet and they have asked for too large of an addition compared to their budget. A simple shrinking of the additions helps it fit in your budget.

As a contractor I try to make my clients happy, my clients won't be happy if they end up way over budget, so if you can change their minds and adjust their thinking about what they can afford and what they really need right from the starting line then the rest of the job will go a lot smoother and at the end everyone will be happy and paid!

So when you meet with your contractor for that first renovation talk don't be afraid to tell them what your budget is, it will be beneficial for all parties. The contractor will have a budget to work from and a clear direction to lead you too get the renovations you want (and renovations you require) while keeping you within the budget that you have specified.

Rob Abbott 

Spring Construction Season Has Arrived

The sun is shining, birds are signing and soon the framing guns will be ringing. That's right it's the official start to construction!

Now construction never actually stops anymore in this area but this time of the year is when most people start thinking about their own construction projects.

Whether you are thinking about building a;

• New House
• An addition to your home or cottage
• Renovating your home or cottage
• Adding or repairing decks or porches
• Building a treehouse for the little ones
• Adding bathrooms
• New kitchens

Or a combination of any of the above, if you are planning on any of these then you best get started with your plans and budgeting soon. Because soon all the contractors that you are interested in talking too might be either booked up for the rest of the summer or so busy quoting other projects that they can't quote yours in a timely manner.

To avoid this you need to make sure that you start the process early and focus on what you really want in a contractor. You need to find someone that you can work with, someone that doesn't just know what you are doing but also works well with you the homeowner. Because depending on the size and scope of the project you could end up working with this person for a while and if you don't get a long then your project will not be enjoyable.

One thing to remember about the spring is that the real estate market really picks up, with the increase in home sales comes the increase in demand for contractors to help repair, renovate or add to homes that have just recently been purchased. These projects usually come about quickly and start just as fast. They can take a contractor in the spring from being available to completely booked for most of the spring and summer. The hotter the real estate market the worse this problem becomes. 

In a lot of cases contractors can find themselves booked all the way until next year with the work they pick up in the spring from people buying and selling real estate.

All of these market forces can affect your efforts to get your project priced and completed, that's why the number one thing I tell people is to start early and keep at it until you find what you need to get your project completed.

If you have a project that you are wanting completed this spring/summer send us an email at info@villagebuilders.ca and lets see if we can help.

Rob 

Village Builders Inc. 

Mistakes When Buying Real Estate

When you are looking at a home to buy in the type of real estate market that is today, (a market where there isn't a lot of homes for sale and the price of those homes has risen with the market demand) don't start projecting your dream home on to it.

What do I mean by "projecting your dream home" on a resale home? It means that you look at a home and you start envisioning all the renovations that you would do to it to make it your own.

Now this is a common practice with home buyers, to envision what a home could look like with some changes, but what starts to happen in a tight market (with limited homes for sale) is people start changing everything about the house.

Recently I have been asked for prices from people that wanted to buy homes that wanted me to give them a budget price on renovation work on older homes in the area. The problem is that its not just renovation work that people want they also want to add square footage so the budget price includes an addition. Additions are far and away a lot more money then most of the renovations that are asked for by the potential buyers.
In the end the budget ends up being almost as much as some of the houses that are for sale. These budgets run well into the hundreds of thousands and it ends up throwing a monkey wrench into the deal.

When you are looking to buy a home and you ask a contractor to work up a budget for you be careful what you tell them. If you tell them an endless stream of changes that you want to the house because that is what your dream is then they (the contractor) will work out the cost based on what you have asked for and that can end up being a lot of money all at once.

What you should be doing is putting them into 3 categories;

1. Immediate repairs. These are things that need to be fixed before you can move in or fairly quickly after you move in, these would be leaky roofs, leaky foundations, broken furnaces, broken windows, etc.
2. Updates and making the home functional. People are pretty resilient, they will adapt to pretty much anything but it doesn't make life easier or more functional. These things are new room layouts, moving the laundry room, new kitchen, new plumbing, new electrical, new bathrooms, updating insulation, refinishing floors, painting. Houses should be updated and renovated every 15 to 20 years, that's not just for resale but also because everything wears out and will need to be replaced. So unless you bought a house that had just been renovated then you have to figure on renovating the major areas in the house within so many years of moving in. 
3. Long term Plans. These are plans that will cost a lot more money then you are willing to spend, these plans can change overtime with your life. Examples of this are adding more square footage to the home (an addition). Or building a garage or carport on the property, also demolishing part of the house to rebuild it is a longer term plan. These big ticket items should always be considered part of the longer term, it allows you to save money and properly design something so that you get the most bang for your buck when you fully commit. Additions can a lot of times be added to your home while you still live there, to a certain extent.

If you were to take the rather large budget that you were given by your contractor about the house you want to buy and break it down into those three categories then you can see if spreading out the spending overtime makes sense when buying the home. After decades of spending money on it will you get your money out of it at the end when you sell it? Does spreading the money around for years mean that you can actually afford to spend that money? Do you want to spend that much money over a longer period of time or do you want to spend your money all at once to get it over with?

Deciding on what you want to do renovation wise will help clarify if you can afford to buy the home and also if the house actually will work for you now and in the long term.

Rob
Village Builders Inc.

Stop Repairing Your Cottage And Renovate Already

This winter is turning out to be a wide one with temperatures rising and falling from warm enough to allow it to rain to so cold that you don't want to go outside into the freezer. We have weeks of blowing and snowing and then rain and sunny skies. This kind of weather can be really hard on older chalets and cottages as they will have foundation problems, pipes freezing, heating system issues, roof leaks and a whole host of other issues that will go wrong with the building.

This could be considered a disaster, with you having to spend money on fixing or repairing all these issues that keep happening to your place when you are simply trying to enjoy your weekend.

There is another way to look at it, its a wake up call, its your cottage/chalet telling you that its time to renovate and repair the place so that this doesn't happen in the future. The winter is actually a pretty good time to start having your cottage fixed. A good contractor can renovate and repair your cottage while still allowing you to be able to use it when you come up on the weekends.

As they are renovating they then can fix all the other issues that prop up like freezing pipes or heating system issues. Instead of you finding the problem when you arrive on friday night, your contractor would find it in the middle of the week and have it repaired before you arrive on the weekend.

Your cottage will require renovations in the near future, why not forgo the cost of emergency repairs, hire a contractor to renovate the cottage and have him take care of everything without the cost and stress of the emergency repairs.

This winter isn't a one off, extreme weather is becoming the norm in Southern Ontario, so you might as well start preparing your cottage/chalet for it now, have it renovated and fixed right and not worry about it into the future.

Call a contractor to start repairing and renovating today,

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.