Estimating Renovation Costs
I’m a newbie brownstone hunter, and would appreciate advice on estimating renovation costs. What’s the best way to estimate repair/renovation costs when looking at a building? At what point does it make sense to bring an architect or a contractor to look at the building? And which would you use for an initial pre-offer renovation…
I’m a newbie brownstone hunter, and would appreciate advice on estimating renovation costs. What’s the best way to estimate repair/renovation costs when looking at a building? At what point does it make sense to bring an architect or a contractor to look at the building? And which would you use for an initial pre-offer renovation estimate?
Any resources for rough estimates of what it costs to renovate a brownstone?
Thanks!
We are about 1/3rd through a near gut (new electrical, gas, ac, windows, mostly new plumbing, etc) and so far it is running us about $160/sq ft. Mostly not high end appliances and finishes but not low either — middle I guess.
And we really like our contractor – not fancy but very reliable and trust-worthy and his crew is hard working. I don’t rely on him for the “specialty items” but very that is very limited so far.
The thing with hungry contractors, though, is that I’ve had people run out of money on me — stop paying their workers, try to do the work themselves, screw it up, and I wind up just throwing them out and re-doing it all myself. There’s a good side and a bad side to contractors being hungrier.
$500/sqft as an estimate is pretty spot-on–if you plan on coating the entire place in gold leaf, that is. We’re doing close to an entire gut now at half that price (not crazy high end, but pretty darn nice). Don’t be scared!
And I agree with i_disagree–why make an offer without bringing your contractor first? Any decent-minded contractor will be willing to spend half an hour walking through a place with you and tossing out (an albeit) rough number. Then you’re offer will be actually, you know, accurate.
btw, contractors need work these days, and the cost of raw materials has plummeted in the past year. Haggle!
All of the above is true unless you’re my landlady. She put in a new kitchen with new tile on floor and wall, seven feet of counter and cabinets, had the whole apt repainted, and the floors redone for $2,000. I think that figure included just the labor and not the materials.
Sorry, I can’t see $500 psft even for a gut reno, unless you are adding major exterior work. For a 3000sft brownstone, that’s $1.5 million!
If you plan properly you can live in the place when the reno is being done, and eat there as well.
I spose you could spend that if you re-created major detail using old world craftsmen flown over from Italy and stuff, but $200 psft should be more than adequate. You can knock that down a lot if you use lesser grade stuff, but it doesn’t pay.
Also you should consider that most tradespeople and professionals are looking for work these day, not like in 2006 when no one would even call you back for a medium size job. And a lot of materials as well have dropped in price, copper, iron, even lumber.
You know what, I should qualify that last post: I *did* just renovate 3400 sqft for about $400k, which is just north of $100/sqft. That was in North Carolina, we didn’t move any of the plumbing or major walls, had only minor (well, easily remedied) structural issues, and we did buckets of work ourselves over 3 years.
We renovated a brownstone in Carol Gardens between 2001-2004, also did buckets of work ourselves, but had a lot more issues to address (had to replace plumbing, wiring, HVAC, internal structural issues, moved a few walls around, but finishes not too high end — used Sears appliances, Home Depot cabinets, bulk tile, refinished existing floors, etc.) That ran us about $200/sqft. But my husband took a year off of work to do a lot of this himself, and even after that we both spent every evening and weekend working on it ourselves.
Every estimate I’ve ever gotten from an architect, GC, etc, to have other people handle a renovation project has been in the $400-500/sqft range average over the house (more for kitchen and bath, less for bedrooms, etc.) This includes estimates I’ve received outside of the NYC metro area.
Look, the guy who said budget $500/sqft knows what he’s talking about. The absolute minimum you’d be able to get away with spending on a renovation would be around $200/sqft if you do a lot of work yourself and don’t use a lot of high-end finishes. If you use an architect and a GC and a designer and blah blah, you can very easily bust $500/sqft.
I knew an engineer who built a house for $100/sqft in another city several years ago, but that guy was a master miser — did a lot of work himself, used his buddies to do the rest of the work, only used materials that he got good deals on, and most of all, built new. Renovation, for some reason, always seems to turn out at least as expensive as building new (and frequently more expensive). I don’t quite know why. It’s one of those mysteries of life.
Bottom line: hope for $200/sqft, but be prepared for that number to double (or worse).
There’s really no way to give a round number for how much you’d spend on a reno, which is tough because I’m guessing you’re trying to add together a reno number with a sale number and a closing cost number to figure out how much house you can afford. Unfortunately, you can’t really do it that way.
Here are some considerations that might help:
– How much work can you/will you do yourself, and how much do you need others to do? You can save a lot of money by doing things like demo yourself. We just saved a pile of cash by closing up the holes the plumbers and electricians made rather than paying them to do it.
– Do you need to address building systems (plumbing, heating, electric, roof) or just finishes? Those things are expensive.
– Do you need to move walls/rooms? Moving plumbing and electricity is more expensive than using what’s there. Plus permitting can get expensive.
A new kitchen is about $40k and a new bathroom is about $20k for average finishes/appliances/fixtures. If you’re re-doing an existing bathroom, you could probably do it for $10k. If you’re re-doing a kitchen in place using, say, reclaimed cabinets and used appliances, you can probably do it for $15k.
I just put down about 600sf of new floor in one room and three hallways. The materials cost $2500 (including matching shoe molding) and the labor cost about $1200. I could have cut the material cost in half, but wanted to use green materials.
This is just a start. What I’d recommend is seeing a whole bunch of places (even places you’re not really interested in) and making a rough inventory of what would need to be done in each place, so you can get a sense of the kinds of work you’ll be looking at. Ask your realtor what s/he thinks the reno range (low to high) is for each property. You’ll start to get enough of a sense of round numbers that you can feel a little more oriented.
The bottom line, though, is this: You’re going to spend more money than you want to spend. If you get too bogged down in that, you’ll never buy. Find something you think you can live with, take a few meditation classes, close your eyes when you write the checks, roll up your sleeves, and dig in. Buying is a good decision.
in this market, you don’t really need to make an offer before you have an architect or an engineer take a look. even in winter 2006, we were able to have an engineer visit before making an offer. all you get at that point is a very broad estimate of reno costs, and generally some comfort that, say, the foundation isn’t sinking, but for us (also first time buyers) this brought the added confidence that our offer was generally do-able when reno costs were added to it. dibs is right, though, that these days you also should be able to get them agree to an offer contingent upon later, more detailed inspections. and you may be able to ask for a discount based on the results.
as for reno costs, i agree with the others that it’s very hard to opine without specifics. i will say that we spent about double what we “wanted” to. part of the increase went to resolutions to either bad surprises or unanticipated possibilities, a goodly portion went to bad estimates or change orders due to sloppy contracts, and the rest went to costs incurred due to delay and various types of mismanagement.