Demolition Derby

Well, I haven’t checked in since December 1 of last year (2009). I didn’t do much on the house in December and January, so there wasn’t much to report. My dad had cataract surgery mid-December, so my #1 electrician and all-round do-all guy was down for the count recovering. I used the time to work on a music project that I started about the same time I started house-hunting, and we all took the holidays off.

Early January I had the basement windows replaced with glass block, and I had one problem window completely blocked in with cinder-block. Mid-January I got a call from my electrician saying it would be warm enough (i.e., above 35 degrees F) to install my new service. I was out of town on business, so my dad oversaw the operation. They brought in a spanky new 200 amp service, and decommissioned all the existing electric in the house. Then they hooked up the furnace, washer and dryer to their respective circuits, and left dad to do the rest.

He spent a great deal of time just ripping out the old electrical wiring in the basement, which looked like it had been run by Rocket J. Squirrel afflicted with ADD. Horrible! Once the basement was clean of all wiring, he began rewiring the first floor. Dad got all the outlets rewired in the living room, dining room and sitting room, leaving the kitchen for last, since that is the heaviest and toughest room as far as electrical requirements and codes.

My dad - happy because he convinced me to strip the kitchen and bathroom of their plaster and lath.

My original plan was to do as little demolition as possible – in fact, aside from pulling out various water damaged materials from the basement, I was thinking (hoping…) that there wouldn’t be much in the way of demo. So why is there a 20-yard dumpster in my driveway? Well. It became evident that there was no possible way to rewire the kitchen with all the outlets and circuits a modern kitchen requires without ripping the walls and ceiling open. So we put the wiring project on pause while we removed walls, ceiling and one gawdawful orange linoleum floor from the kitchen.

And right on time, I had my first (likely of many) “well, while we’re going this far, we might as well do that too” moments. The bathroom is directly over the kitchen – and was not on the docket for any true renovation at this point. But bathrooms are the second heaviest electrical rooms with specific code requirements, and since we’d just exposed all the plumbing from beneath when we removed the kitchen ceiling, it made sense to demo the bathroom at the same time, and just re-plumb and re-wire both rooms. So that’s the plan. However, I am on a fairly tight budget, so my
challenge to myself is this. I want to get the bathroom and kitchen done for $7,000.00 on fixtures and aesthetics. Yes, that’s right. Two rooms, seven grand. I’m giving myself another $1,000.00 grace for plumbing and sheetrock. So I put a budget together, and I pegged the seven grand before I even got all my pricing together.

Well, I’ve ridden this pony before, so I dug my heels in and got in touch with my inner skinflint. I absolutely refused to succumb to the “2x theory of renovation” (it costs twice as much and takes twice as long) without a serious fight. I whittled out some bucks here and there, and took a look. Still over budget. I whittled some more. And more. I did some online shopping for certain things, got some things used, and just plain comparison shopped for other stuff. I’m still slightly over my $7,000.00 budget but not by much, and not for lack of trying to stay within it.

So how did I do it? Well, here’s an example using the bathroom figures. The list below is a partial list of preliminary numbers:

• 48″ sink base: $700.00
• Cultured marble sinktop: $350.00
• Toilet: $240.00
• Porcelain bathtub: $240.00
• Wall & floor tile: $1,500.00
• Shower lights: $140.00
• Vanity Light: $150.00
• Chandelier: $258.00
• Sink faucet: $100.00
• Bath/shower hardware: $300.00
• Towel bars: $15.00
• Toilet paper holder: $10.00
• Plumbing: $500.00
• Radiator cover: #335.00

TOTAL: $4,838.00

Now this isn’t a bad pricetag, really, for a renovated bathroom, and I got my pricing at local stores like Lowe’s, Home Depot, and independently owned tile and lighting places. However, I have to do the kitchen too, and I am doing both rooms with healthy respect for the 1924 vibe of the rest of the house. Therefore, I can’t always just go for what’s cheapest. I have to take the era of the house into consideration.

The wood floor is visible where the old sink cabinet had been. I was so happy to see it hadn't been destroyed.

What I want when people walk through the back door into my kitchen, or excuse themselves to the bathroom, is for them to wonder how I got so lucky as to find a house with a vintage kitchen and bathroom in need of no restoration.

Doing this with money to burn is simple. Doing it on a broken shoestring… not so simple. BUT do-able. So I started with the bathroom cabinet. No way was I spending $700.00 on one. Thanks for playing. I went to a shabby little outlet store called Mr. Seconds. I’ve heard they are a closeout store for Home Depot. There, I found the sink cabinet, the sink and the toilet for about half the price of just the sink cab at Home Depot. Ha.

My next move was to search for a porcelain bathtub. They just don’t make good bathtubs anymore IF you actually like to bathe. Yes, they make jacuzzis and designer clawfoots and all sorts of things that would
require a separate shower stall. But that nice, deep porcelain tub that you can install and create a tile surround? Well, the best you can find is a fairly unattractive, 14″ deep (might as well be a birdbath) thing that really isn’t the ticket if you’re like me, and like to luxuriate in a hot bath regularly.

I'd love to have kept this old tub, but it's under a window, and has a curved end, so I can't put it between two end walls and create a tub/shower combination.

So the challenge was on. I had heard of a place called Buffalo Reuse that salvages all sorts of items from the many homes in Buffalo being demolished. I called to see if they had the sort of bathtub I wanted, and the guy said, “Oh yeah, we’ve got about 100 tubs out in the yard. They’re about 50 bucks a piece.” Cha-CHING! Oh yeah. Speak to me! I found the perfect tub, and while I was there, I actually picked out a second tub for my future 1st floor bathroom. Bird in the hand and all…. 50 bucks a piece.

I got my lighting costs down by going to Lowe’s. They have a really great selection and fantastic prices. I found the EXACT chandelier that was $258.00 at a local lighting store, for… wait for it…. $103.00. Yep. Sweet. The chandelier is my one girly splurge, but cutting more than half the cost out of it almost ruins the ’splurge’ factor. (But not quite – a girl loves a smokin’ bargain too!) And the tile costs I reduced by doing a couple of things. First, I
started at Lowe’s in their tile department, figured out my design, and calculated my cost. Then I went to a local tile store, just on a whim, and was able to beat every single price that I had from Lowe’s. I certainly didn’t expect that. In fact, when I walked in, this woman came up to me to see if I needed help, and I laughed and said, “I’m going to be the most boring customer you ever had – I’m looking for cheap, cheap, cheap!”

Instead of turning her nose up at me, she said, OK, let’s see what you need. And what I came away with was far better than what I would have had if I had stuck with my Lowe’s plan.

Then, the topper, for me in the bathroom was the discovery that the original pine floor (the entire upstairs is pine) was not only in good shape, it was one better. It had never been sanded or finished. When we pulled the linoleum and underlaiment, we found the raw pine floor that had been nailed down in 1924. So instead of tiling the bathroom floor, I will have the pine floor sanded and finished. This will save me some money since I have to have all the floors in the house done anyway, and it will be a warmer floor than tile would be.

I hit Overstock.com for plumbing fixtures for the sink and shower, and during the demolition, I salvaged 99% of the tile that was on the walls. It’s a great rose-beige color, so I am going to integrate those tiles, plus the ceramic towel bar, soap dish, and toilet paper holder, into my new design. This helped reduce my overall tile budget as well, and got me looking in a different direction at color choices for that room.

I was going to go with sort of pastel colors, which would make the room undeniably feminine, but with this sort of rose-beige (it’s more beige than rose), I have put a darker brown tile called Nutmeg with it, and I’m using white subway tile, cove tile and chair-rail. These colors will make the bathroom a bit more ‘gender neutral’ so if I were ever to sell the place (please, someone kill me if I do!), and a guy bought it, or a family, all they’d have to do is replace my 103.00 chandelier with a more restrained fixture, and the bathroom wouldn’t be girly at all. Ha.

OK, so where does this leave my budget? Right about here:

• 48″ sink base: $245.00
• Cultured marble sinktop: $75.00
• Toilet: $78.00
• Porcelain bathtub: $50.00
• Wall tile: $1083.00
• Shower lights: $38.00
• Vanity Light: $48.00
• Chandelier: $103.00
• Sink faucet: $59.00
• Bath/shower hardware: $114.00
• Towel bars: $0.00
• Toilet paper holder: $0.00
• Plumbing: $500.00
• Radiator cover: #335.00

TOTAL: $2749.00

So with a little stubbornness, some creative thinking, and a little shopping, I cut over two grand out of my bathroom budget, and I am actually happier with the current design than I was with the one I had in mind in the beginning.

I’ll check in with the kitchen budget soon.

Originally posted March 11, 2010