With the offspring out of the house, Sarah out of grad school, and myself in a new phase of my career, it is finally time to renovate the kitchen and fix the addition. When we started to consider the scope of the job, it quickly became obvious that the job was going to be expensive to get what we want but that it would add very little value to the house. We would still have an underheight basement with limited revenue potential and while we might enjoy the house a lot more, it would not be a good investment. With the cost of land in Vancouver, the single family home is dead, especially in our area where homes are considered “affordable”. With no “mortgage helper” the buyer of our home would be a builder.
Another option, and likely the most sensible, would be to just knock the house down and rebuild like many of our neighbours have done. This would solve ALL the problems at once, get us a brand new everything and allow us to rent or sell a portion. While it might be the best investment decision it would destroy all of what we love in our home and is not for us.
What we plan to do then in order to get our new kitchen is to replace our entire foundation. It might seem a bit drastic to go from “new cupboards” to “new foundation” but we feel the investment will be worth it and allow us to get more of what we want. The renovation will create a full height basement (8 to 9 ft finished height) and a legal 2 bedroom suite with a separate entrance. The new foundation will change the footprint of the house as well so that our new addition can be larger and will create additional space in the basement as well. The goal is to have the rent from the basement ($2000 to $2500 month seems to be the going rate currently) cover the cost of the kitchen addition and renovation. We will have to remove our chimney for the lift so we will make minor changes to the living room but for now we will not change the rest of the house because it is not in our current budget.
Some costs we can’t avoid. We are doing this all “by the book”. We have to redo our sewer lines to separate out the storm and sanitary sewers which are combined in our old house. This is a good thing but a significant cost. Vancouver also has some stringent regulations about energy efficiency so we are going to have to work within those. We also have to install fire sprinklers because the renovation is over a certain threshold. By not touching big sections of the house we are hoping to limit the sprinklers to the basement and the kitchen. Wish us luck!
The plan to stretch our budget is to spend our money on professionals to do the work we can’t, but to do as much as possible ourselves. This currently includes removing and disposing of the asbestos siding, gutting the basement, removing the chimney within the house (a pro will take off the top, patch and reshingle the roof) and remove the current deck and addition. We will also have to rescue plants from the garden and find temporary homes for them so that the garden can be rebuilt with as much connection to family as it currently has. When the construction is done we will paint, put in baseboards, assemble and install our cabinets, finish the siding, and redo the landscaping. It’s a lot of work.