Opening the Books

Well since many of you requested that we share how much the remodel cost. I have no problem opening the books to show you readers how much we spent, and how much the individual pieces cost. If you have any specific request, how much was that light etc, let me know.

I had better start this off with a large disclaimer. The dollar amounts I'm going to share do not involve the labor/installation cost. I haven't calculated how much the time I spent and the time all of the people who volunteered to help me is worth into any of these cost. I can only share the amount I spent on the particular material etc. and in many cases I got extremely good deals based upon the fact that many of the people cut me a deal since it was my first house and that my dad has used many of them for services in the past. So if some of you read this and think wow I could do that for that much money, I would be extremely cautious this is not the norm.

On that note, If some of you would like to know how much certain things would have cost had I paid someone to do it I can figure that for you.

Lets start with the big numbers that not to many people realize happens.
We payed roughly $14,000 in interest to the bank over the course of the project, just for the opportunity to have money to spend on the project.

Now the list;

For the interior
$3700 - on the birch plywood for the walls
$5500 - for the new furnace hvac and reworking the duct work
$3000 - roughly for the rough in electrical work
$1000 - for the new insulation that was sprayed in
$1000 - for trim and new exterior doors
$2500 - for the all of the tile/grout/mortar in the house
$500 - for the mirror in the bathroom and the frosted glass
$3200 - for the new vinyl windows
$1000 - for the interior painting
$2000 - for the cork flooring
$6500 - for the cabinets in the house

So if you add all that up we spent somewhere between 40k-45k on the interior of the house.

The exterior; New patio, siding, garage, fence, etc.

$16000 - for the lumber for garage, siding and fence
$9000 - for the all of the concrete, new driveway, garage slab, and patio
$1400 - for the garage foundation
$600 - for the garage windows
$800 - for the garage doors
$1200 - for the epdm garage roof
$800 - for the steel I-beam in the garage
$1900 - concrete labor for the garage floor and driveway
$20000 - labor for the crew who built the garage, fence, installed siding and helped pour patio
$2000 - in landscaping so far

So that adds up to around 55k for the exterior.

So my previous statement of around 100k for the remodel was very close. Looking at this I can say its probably 5k-10k higher than that if you factor all of the stuff put on our various personal credit cards and the cash we spent along the way. I also didn't factor in anything for a lot of the freebies I got, stump grinding, dirt, etc. If any of you have specific questions about any of this or would like more specific info in a particular area, leave a comment or send me an email.


$6500 - misc. spending on the credit card at various places. Lowe's etc.