Pricing for Townhouse Renovation?
Hi, we’ve been looking at some townhouses in Cobble Hill recently. I think I have a good sense of where the market is on pricing. But then I mentioned to a realtor friend that no matter what house we end up buying, it’ll probably require a top-to-bottom renovation, given the condition of what we’ve looked…
Hi, we’ve been looking at some townhouses in Cobble Hill recently. I think I have a good sense of where the market is on pricing. But then I mentioned to a realtor friend that no matter what house we end up buying, it’ll probably require a top-to-bottom renovation, given the condition of what we’ve looked at so far. She casually mentioned, “Oh, that’ll run you about $400-$500 per square foot to do a nice job.” My jaw dropped. Look, I can get my arms around the idea that the house is going to cost several million, but is it really true that I need to be thinking 150%-200% that amount to get something liveable? Some of the houses we’ve looked at are 25×45 feet over four floors – that would mean we’d end up spending over $2 million on renovation!
As noted above, the range on cost/sf is dependent on what scope of work you really intend to pursue. I recommend to get some perspective taking a critical look at your priorities for the new home; what you must do, what you want to do, what you can do. It would also be useful to get some professional opinion on the house. Speak to an inspector, contractor, Architect and get some handle on the depth of potential work so you can make some informed decisions.
A couple people (contractors) with house renovation experience I’ve worked with on projects in the past you may want to contact are:
Joe Maldonado, J’s Custom Contracting, 917.642.2137
John Bissell, JB Carpentry, 917.796.2030
Tell them George referred you.
Best of Luck.
Not to sound too self-interested, but this is really the kind of advice you should be getting from your architect. While I know the snarky comments will soon begin in response, a responsible architect will have gotten to know the client and his/her program, their budget, their taste, and can then use his/her experience to bear in predicting reasonable budgets for a given project. As you can gather from the previous posts, the fact is you can do a renovation on a shoestring or with millions of dollars. The choice is all yours, and an architect can help make it an informed choice.
Like everyone has said, it can be $150-$500 depending on level of finish and complexity of the project.
I know someone who spent almost $250,000 on a custom kitchen. But that involved removing the original rear bearing wall, putting in steel beams, handmade custom sized cabinets, marble counters, high end appliances, etc.
A nice custom Home Depot kitchen (better quality than IKEA) can run you $10k.
As they say, the devil’s in the details…
Yes, I would say we did it for about 20% less. We did everything, including 2 kitchens and 6.5 baths (we have a ground floor rental) We didn’t do the entire facade, but we did add a small room to the roof. We did not demolish all interior walls. but did everything else like above.
300/sqft bought me a complete gut reno of 3500 sqft – all mechanicals, plumbing, complete demolition of all internal walls, preservation of whatever details were left, 4 high-end bathrooms & one kitchen, facade, zoned A/C, heating, facade redone, repointing, new roof, windows, floors, some new joists, staircase work. Made some errors in the process, could conceivably have done it for maybe 20% less at best.
Given the way it was cut up, preserving the position of the plumbing, mechanicals would have meant a really bad layout.
Hello there,
In order to know how much exackly your renovation would cost, you would need to know what needs to be renovated.
You can certainly get it done for the lowest possible.
My husband and I just started to work in Brooklyn a year ago and are looking for people that need to renovate their homes, we are charging prices that are affordable.
If you find a home and need renovation and restoration we would be happy to help you with the whole process.
http://www.pratesplastering.web.officelive.com
Good luck!!
-Aida and Willian
My IKEA kitchen was 10k, and a bath redo was the same, and my deck/garden about 20k, but I suspect Cobblethrone is higerh-end, judging from the width (25 footers are top of the line) size of the houses (4500 sq ft) (and maybe even his handle? 😉
CobbleThrone, I’m curious. What is the condition of what you have been seeing? Are the mechanicals and structure sound, but the baths and kitchens need updating? Just wondering what you get in that market.
BTW, you can re-do a rental kitchen for surprisingly little. Like less than $10,000. My landlady paid only $2,000. It looks really nice, but the grout wasn’t done properly and will have to be redone in a few years.
I took a house that wasn’t in the best shape and made it fairly nice (new floors, fixed up walls, replaced a few ceilings (with tin in some places), new facade, painted everywhere for about $40 sq/ft. If you want a new kitchen, add 25-50k, same for the bathroom. About 40% of that went toward redoing the facade and another 20% for new floors as just fixed costs, maybe 10% for a new boiler, so you can discount appropriately.
Best thing to do I think is to leave everything where it is and fix it up. Replacing stuff willy-nilly gets expensive fast and is really not necessary. Hire a handyman or two to basically live there (i.e. come for a month or two or three) and patch up the walls, skim coat if you need, do a bit of carpentry, replace things here and there, and you can get away with a “pseudo-gut” reno for substantially less. Adding new floors, nice lighting, and having a good painter fix up the walls as he paints is another plus.
You can save a lot of money by a) don’t replace perfectly fine stuff (like tearing down walls and putting up drywall if you don’t need to); b) don’t hire a contractor! they eat up an additional 10-20% just to manage your project (and they can induce the dreaded “scope-crawl”, which starts to cost you) and you can’t vet the hourly price of every sub they have c) stretch it out, have just one or two guys come in at a time. this makes it easier to be your own GC and saves you money since you can direct people more efficiently