Renovating an Older Home

My house is 71 years old. Only, can I still say that about the entire house since we had to literally replace half the house because it had issues. It started out innocently enough; we were going to remodel the kitchen because it had never been done by any of the previous owners, and everything in the kitchen was starting to wear out, crack, fall apart, and there was a weird smell which we later discovered was mold.

We bought the house just about 5 years ago. The house clearly needed work but it’s in a great neighborhood and close to the high school which my son would be attending in the fall of that year. The house had a cute charm that older homes do, and it had great space. But there were things about the house that we knew needed to be done, but we had time. And then Covid hit and everything shut down, and we were all stuck in the house. Our plans for fixing up the house were put on hold until now.

Fast forward to 2023. We could finally get the work done to the house that we wanted to do. We had been walking across the old kitchen floor and feeling it give in places, and my husband and I would give each other looks……..maaaybe we should avoid that part of the kitchen floor. There was a weird smell, and we kept saying: It’s ok, we’re ripping out the kitchen. Both bathrooms had started to fall apart, cracks in the tubs which were the original tubs. Cracks in tile in the bathrooms and kitchen. Ok, we realized we had to fix up the bathrooms too. The steps out back that led into the house started to crumble. Ok, the steps need help too. I swear the house heard us talking about what we were going to do to it and it started to ask for help. LOL! And then our next door neighbor on the one side asked if we could remove this wall that we called the wall of death because it was so obnoxious and high…..and had been built when the neighbors before us and the neighbor had lived in the houses because the former home owners hated each other. Ok, so the wall coming down started off the remodel, and I admit that wall falling was satisfying to watch.

And then…….my mom announced (not asked) that she wanted to move in with us because she was tired of living alone in her big, older home that had started to also do questionable things. My mom came to our house every weekend to visit, but this particular weekend she walked our house to assess it because she was moving in and she announced: “We need to do to work on this house! I can’t live here like this!” And so it began. What started out as fixing up some things in the house, things that we could afford to do, turned into a big project because my mother wanted things done to the house, only…….she was paying. She sold her house and had some extra money, and she wanted things her way. Well, Ok then! I guess that’s good?? In some respect…….

We searched for a contractor and found a great company that my friend had used. Competitive pricing, trust worthy, lots of references and a good rating with the Better Business Bureau. Got an architect to draw up plans, who at some point had apparently talked to my mother when I wasn’t looking because all of a sudden there was a cat enclosure at the end of my house……I was looking at the plans and noticed this enclosure with a little cat drawn in, and I exclaimed while laughing: “What the fuck is this cat thing in the middle of my house?” I laughed so hard I snorted. The architect explained that my mom had requested a cat enclosure so her cat could roam around as if she were outside. I texted my mom: There will not be a cat enclosure in the middle of my house, and she grudgingly agreed that there will be an enclosed dog run that her cat could use when my dogs were in the house.

The plans were finally approved by us to go to the city after much back and forth and removal of things that made the work on our house super ridiculous…..as in turning things into a house that we did not want. After all, whose name is on the title of the house! And the city approved the plans and the work began on our house. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. There was definitely mold in the kitchen so the kitchen was torn down to studs, and asbestos was found so we had a few days of asbestos removal from the house. And then there was the kitchen floor…….the entire floor had to be replaced because of termite damage that apparently the inspector didn’t notice when we bought the house…….and but we had to replace the old windows in the house so they are now energy efficient. Oh and by the way, your roof is bad so that needs to be replaced too. And there are so many things that you do not think about when you renovate a house because when you buy a house everything is already included……so picking out interior doors and knobs…..lighting, knobs for kitchen cabinets and bathroom drawers, what did we want the tile in the kitchen and bathrooms to look like and then picking out all the tile. And fun things happening like a sudden rain storm that happened before the house was enclosed so water came pouring down through the fan in the older bathroom we were going to tear out anyway. The construction crew came right out and covered the house so crisis averted. The power and water being shut off for hours on end as the plumbing and electrical was redone. Oh, and although we GREATLY appreciated that this construction is super reliable, sometimes having to unlock everything to let them in at 6:30 am, 6 days a week got overwhelming. Lots of 10-12 days which again, we thought was fabulous because it meant things were getting done faster.

And then there has been my mother complaining left and right about the rental house she is in because that had its challenges as well. “Ok mom,” I told her, “You wanted all this extra stuff in my house so it’s taking longer to get the job done.” And she was insisting on moving in with her cat before the work was done. Um NO! You cannot move in now because one of the guys will accidentally let the cat out and then what? And I can see her yelling at the crew who are all very nice and have already told me horror stories about impossible former clients who treated them like crap……so no, that is not happening!

After 5 months of renovation we were told that we can move upstairs because it’s done, and it’s advisable to do so because the crew will be finishing the other side of the house and ripping out the old bathroom. Finally, an end in sight. We’re just weeks away from the house being done……..and then my mom moves in…….and now I can see that her having her own side of the house is a great idea. My mom can be downstairs in our former bedroom, where she has a private bathroom and office she can work out of, and we can be upstairs and out of the way……I admit I was at first against actually adding onto the house, but my mom was right in that we all need to be spaced out in the house, so I am glad that we did listen to her about that. Although I do feel manipulated, and some of the things that we did to the house I didn’t really want to do, but it is what it is.