Top Ten Building & Remodeling Mistakes to Avoid

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1 Top Ten Building & Remodeling Mistakes to Avoid Page 1

2 Advice from Experience Building and Remodeling are expensive to have done right. Mistakes can cost homeowners thousands of dollars and years of distress. 1. Don t Cheap Out on Your Deck As the last thing a builder usually installs (other than grass) decks are usually built on the most meager of budgets. They are the item most often underestimated and built by handymen. Not only that, but they require structure and design to avoid seriously damaging the home and injuring occupants and guests. Improper use of flashing at the ledger board can easily soak and rot a wall before anyone becomes aware it is happening. Railings, stairways, and landings must be built to standards which provide safety. The structure must be on solid footings, including the step landing pad. Easily the most underestimated feature of the modern home, even a modest size deck 12x12 should start at around $15,000-20, Beware the Underbuilt Roof The first common mistake is not considering where the water runoff will go. I can t tell you how many walls, windows, and doors get unduly saturated by a poorly designed roof addition. Also, the lines of the roof are visually powerful and can aid or harm the overall look of a building. Page 2

3 Misaligned fascia boards, lack of sufficient overhang, and careless returns all show in highlighter to an educated buyer. A good contractor won t just agree to build anything that can be stamped and passed through the average town code enforcement office drawn on a napkin. Structurally underbuilt roofs were very common in the period between 1970 and If your home has 2x6 rafters on a six pitch, you could end up investing some serious money having the roof rebuilt, upwards of $50, Interior Designers are Worth their Weight in Gold At the very least, consult one design office, or hire a general contractor who relies on one. Don t let the cabinet builder or the plumber design your kitchen, they are usually not qualified. Inefficient design comes in all shapes, sharp like the corner that sticks out where it shouldn t, long and wearing like the strange weaving dances between kitchen appliances. The list of poor choices is endless. The good news is, there are professionals to guide us all in our choices. The limited cost of their advice provides boundless dividends in living quality. Once again, a good contractor won t just agree with all the ideas the homeowner puts forth. 4. Spray Foam or Go Home Sure, its cozy up there in your finished attic; however, do it correctly to avoid causing condensation related issues. Spray foam insulation is practically the only acceptable means to insulate the roof planes of older homes. Due to the shallow depth and wide/irregular on-center spacing of these frames, one cannot insulate AND ventilate the bay. Closed cell spray foam insulation resolves the issue of condensation. Dormers and Page 3

4 larger skylights require extensive frame remodeling to ensure they don t collapse the roof over time. No one wants to hear that a small dormer starts at about $35,000-50,000 start to finish. Don t hire anyone who claims that it s not a big deal to sit a 1,000 pound dog house on top of your existing roof after cutting out a few rafters without transferring the load. 5. Leave Tiling to the Professionals Tile is expensive to redo. It is always installed better by a tile installer. Hire a general contractor who uses a tile installer. Many people, contractors and homeowners alike, underestimate how easy it is to make a mistake when laying tile. Tile showers are expensive to have built professionally, about $15,000. The confidence of having it built well is priceless in comparison with dealing with years of repair bills that never resolve the foundational issues. Tile floors can last forever, or they can crack and come apart in as little as a week. A good tile installer earns their livelihood making sure the homeowner gets the former, not the latter. 6. Build Stairs Not Steps That creak and groan of uneven steps, covered in various shell layers of renovation, carpet, and tread sleeves - built out of spruce framing lumber with deck stringers. That is the type of garbage that passes for stairs in the average home. There is only one method for building a wooden staircase which will be silent and safe. Anyone can build steps, very few carpenters are willing to build stairs. It is a highly technical and time consuming process, but the results are nothing short of solid - a work of art. Page 4

5 7. Gutters: the Guardians of your Home Properly channeling water away from the walls of a house is the only way to protect them from chronic, weather-related rot. That means the gutters should be installed by a professional providing a warranty, and that the homeowner must keep them flowing and free from obstruction. The best gutters for the average home are seamless aluminum, attached with ample, hidden fasteners screwed into a solid fascia board (why put new gutters on rotten trim?). An absolute must, which is often overlooked, is the flashing installed inside the gutter, and under the drip edge. It prevents water from running behind the gutter, staining and rotting the fascia, soffit, and inevitably, the siding and wall. Helpful options to prolong service intervals in hard to reach areas, like LeafLock, are a valuable addition to the system. 8. Do Your Doors Hang Low? How many homeowners have interior doors which don t stay shut, open, don t latch, or could have a golf ball rolled under them when shut? How many homeowners have exterior doors which are hard to shut, hard to open, can see daylight around the edges, or don t latch properly? My experience leads me to believe that these problems exist in almost every home. Some are the result of settling and are easy to fix, move the striker plate up or down a quarter of an inch. Others are the direct result of incompetent installers, unqualified for any trade yet somehow conning homeowners out of thousands of dollars. 9. Choose the Right Contractor I recently bought a house, and if I were going to build it, the cost would have easily quadrupled. I hear a lot from homeowners about how Page 5

6 they don t want the work to exceed the appraised value of the property. They want to stay in the market value of the neighborhood. They look at the house as a one sided investment with a single return, the sale, or the rental income. Houses provide a diverse array of returns on investment and so does the work done on them. Some of those returns can negatively impact your life s balance. Safety, confidence, comfort, style, family, and community, are all affected by who you choose as a contractor. 10. Don t Hire a Handyman to do a Contractor s Job It s just a small job. No, it s not. If the homeowner has seen fit to call a contractor, not a handyman, it s not that small of a job. This is a red flag to any contractor that the homeowner thinks the job is worth very little, and rarely means that the job is, in fact, as simple as they would lead themselves to believe. Enter the con-artist, who will tell the homeowner anything they want to hear to get their hands on any amount of money the homeowner is willing to give them. Page 6