House Updates 2021

One of the big projects that have been going on with Chris and I over the past few months have been some significant updates to our house. There are some that say that if you want to test a relationship, then build a house or do renovations. Thankfully, we have done the former twice before, so we felt comfortable in taking on the renovation updates. The plan for these updates started at the end of 2019, following the work that I had done on renovating Chris’s mom’s home, which we then sold. As we finalized our plans in early 2020, COVID hit, so we put everything on hold for a short time (which ended up being a year).

First, when I say renovations, we are not really talking about knocking down walls or building new ones, but more cosmetic changes like painting the entire house, new flooring through most of the house, adding outlets and lights in places where we wished we had put them when we built the house originally, and – the biggest project – was redoing our master bathroom.

Next, this post will be a higher-level post on the overall experience, and I may add a few extras on the finer details of some of the projects that we undertook. I’ll provide a summary of “the list” below to outline what we have done or plan to do.

Self Managed or Outsourced?

One of the first things we needed to decide was whether we could self-manage the project, or if we should hand it over to a professional to manage. As our list grew, and we realized that there were going to be a lot of moving pieces, we quickly determined that finding someone to be the “middle person” was going to save us a lot of stress, even though it would add to the cost of getting the project completed.

Here is one insight into this process that if you are like me, letting someone else be in control of something so big, was challenging. For two reasons (for me, mainly): (1) you have to have confidence in the person you are tasking with the job that they can do what you want them to do; and (2) you have to be able to step back and say “you do it” even when the process doesn’t make sense. Let me just add that there were many times when both (1) and (2) were seriously questioned as we moved through what has turned into an almost three-month project. Some of the reasons for this are explained below.

Question & Communicate

I’m not normally shy when it comes to asking questions, but I quickly realized that you had to ask the right question and you had to clarify those answers. The old saying “never assume” is so very true when you are working with contractors. If you don’t understand something, ask. If you don’t understand an expectation, ask. Ask, ask, ask!

The next big thing is to communicate. This experience has taught me that you can’t over-communicate. The contractor may not want the communication, but when things go wrong – and they will – then your communication trail will be a saving grace. During this project, I kept a log of all emails and text messages between me and our contractor. When we had a face-to-face meeting, I kept notes on anything that we agreed to change. As I did when we built our current home, I use Evernote for all of this tracking, as it works with all computers, tablets, and phones. Our contractor did not have a good organizational system, so there were a lot of repeat requests, follow-ups, etc. throughout the process. Keep notes (see below)!

A big part of that communication will be understanding the expectations of your contractor and your subcontractors. One of the first things that a general contractor should provide is a schedule of when the various sub-projects will be started and completed. This should be an agreed document to fit in with what is going on with your life and home. If the schedule says “remove all toilets” and you plan on living in the house during the updates, then that won’t work. For us, one of the first things that was demolished was our bathroom in mid-April, and we did not get this back until the beginning of August. Thankfully we adjusted the schedule to make it impossible to live in the house while the work was being done, and that will also contribute to issues.

In hindsight, had we had a better idea of the process for rebuilding a bathroom (for example), we would have done things differently. The best-laid plans will still go wrong is something we learned. Contractors not turning up when scheduled, hardware taking longer to arrive, personal stuff getting in the way – that will always happen, but understanding the bigger picture better and the impact that each of these will have on your overall project is something that you should accept early on.

Keep Records

I’ve also been dabbling in Notion, and originally set up “the list” for all the work we wanted to be done, and this provided the opportunity to also open up a note and make notes on the fly. For the project management side of things, I love how Notion was able to quickly give me access to any projects assigned to a floor or a room. I was able to also put in the tracking information for the estimates, and keep a finance tracker on the expenditures that were made – all assigned to each project. Ultimately, I was able to export the finance tracker to Google Sheets for simpler sharing options.

While keeping records of communication was relatively easy for me, what I failed to do – and encourage anyone thinking about this in the future to do – is maintain a record of every sub-contractor engaged on your project. When things go wrong (again, they will), having contact information to the right people to connect with to sort out the issue will save you a lot of time. It won’t remove the stress, but it will save time. In our experience, I did not do this, so with some of the outstanding issues that we are trying to wrap up, I have not idea who to contact to get the project completed.

Project List

So what did we do, or – in some cases – what are we doing?

• Interior and Exterior Painting – all walls, ceilings, trim and woodwork were painted or restained/varnished.
• Existing master bathroom shower, flooring and tile was removed, and a larger shower with new tile, flooring and hardware installed.
• All the toilets were replaced with dual-flush one piece products (these were installed over time and not all at once).
• Replaced all the carpet and padding throughout the house, and installed laminate hardwoods in the dining room (where there used to be carpet).
• Installed under-counter lighting in the kitchen.
• Installed hardware on all cabinets and drawers through the house.
• Removed and replaced the pantry system (we used the ELFA system from Container Store).
• Installed cabinets in our game room and media room.
• Installed a floor riser in our media room.
• Replaced exterior lighting on the house (uplights and coach lights).
• Replaced both external doors on the back of the house with internal blinds.
• Installed new lights and power outlets throughout the house.
• Installed a new waterline for a future ice machine in the breakfast nook.
• Installed crown moulding and recessed lighting in the master bedroom.
• Other minor cosmetic (mainly) changes.

Some of these may evolve into their own expanded posts in the coming weeks, and once we have finished cleaning up all the dust I will post pictures.

While there were a number of outstanding items that needed to be completed, which were mainly cosmetic, if I had taken my own advice (as listed above), this would have been completed earlier.

Bottom Line

Overall, we are more than thrilled with what we have done with the house updates. The colors (thanks to our friend, Kean) are spot-on for us, the updates to the master bathroom are eagerly waiting to be fully utilized, and the house has a new look and feel, rather than the dated vibe we started to experience a couple of years ago. While the quality of the work completed by the sub-contractors is great, the same can’t be said for the other work completed. We continue to discover and fix these.

Would we use a contractor again? Yes, most definitely. What we would do differently is manage that person better, especially if they are disorganized.