Renovation on the cheap

Regular readers will know that I am a Brit living in Brooklyn (kind of) but I also still have a modest house in London. Even regularer readers will also know that I am shocked by estimates that are bandied about for renovation in NY. For example, people talk about $20-30,000 just for a kitchen where nothing needs to be moved. I’m particularly shocked because I consider London to be fairly comparable to NYC in cost for many things – there are differences but it broadly comes out in the wash. This is not like Thailand where you can get an entire house built for $20k. Labour rates and materials should not be that different between these two cities.

Here’s a summary of work I’m getting done that’s nearly finished – for $35k at the current exchange rate. All of the workers have been English and legal (no cheating with illegal cheap Polish labour or skirting the authorities). The brief was “high-end of budget but with good quality finishes for a nice effect” (think maybe one notch above Ikea, which I do think is decent quality if put together properly and excellent value for money).

Obviously, going with higher end materials would have added to the cost but would not be in keeping with the type of house and area it is in. All this work is being done to help to sell the property but if it doesn’t sell or I decide to keep it, I wanted it to of a standard that I would be happy living with. The purists will not be happy with the non-original styling but I’m blending practicality and pragmatism – plus originality costs! There’s also enough original detail in the rest of the house.

If I was even remotely organised, I would have taken some “before” pictures so you could see the comparison. But I’m not so you can’t….so there!

Kitchen

The kitchen occupies the same physical space as the old kitchen but with a different layout. The doorway is where a large window used to be. The hole you can just see to the left used to be the entrance to the kitchen but the lower half has been blocked off to create a serving hatch to the dining room. The hole on the right under the counter to the left of the sink is for the dishwasher (which I never use but seems to be a perquisite these days). The countertop is rustic beech – one of the cheaper woods but has a real quality look and feel in the thicker option.

Here’s a closer look at the sink http://imgur.com/dF3ie.jpg with freshly oiled worktop. It doesn’t show up very well in the picture but the tiles have a slightly bevelled edge. I love the look of these tiles so they are the ones I would go for regardless of price so it’s a bonus that they are one of the cheapest ones out there. I went with a more expensive sink and tap unit because I think it is something stands out in a kitchen – $500 of the budget went on this.

Conservatory

This was originally outside the house with the wall on the left being the boundary wall for the garden. Before I bought the house, it had a cheap plastic roof put on so it could be used as a laundry room. The doorway at the end was originally the window for the room at the end. Because I was doing it on the cheap, the opening for this and the kitchen on the right were only done to the width of the windows so as to not have to change the lintels. The left wall had to be insulated, sheetrocked and skim plastered. The floor in the conservatory had to be raised to the height of the adjacent rooms with boards and self-levelling concrete before the tiles could go down. Floor tiles really eat into a budget if you’ve got a large area to cover. These ones were the cheapest I found that didn’t look cheap but the overall floor area meant that $650 of the budget went on this.

Next, we have the real killer expense for the whole reno – the roof. http://imgur.com/HS5uY.jpg Because of the large glass area and the easterly aspect, the room would get very warm during the day. To counter this, we used double-glazed argon-filled panels (the house is also near an airport so sound-proofing is important). That’s $6,000 of glass panels right there.

Bathroom

The house is a turn of the century Victorian and originally did not have an indoor bathroom at all. There was a downstairs bathroom when we bought it but none upstairs where the bedrooms are – not ideal for a family house and really puts potential buyers off. The master bedroom at the front of the house was very large by London standards so we carved out about a third of it for the bathroom. The room was boxed in, sheetrocked and plastered. The bath is an enamelled steel one – plastic ones, which are fairly popular over here, really are a false economy. Because this was not a bathroom before, all new plumbing had to be installed from the boiler at the back of the house (behind the camera in the conservatory picture) to the front of the house where this is – no small job in itself. I went with the same tiles as for the kitchen which somehow give a very different feeling when it covers the whole wall (these are very versatile tiles!). Here’s a picture of the sink http://imgur.com/kKrgu.jpg (mirrored cabinet and vanity light to come) and the towel rail http://imgur.com/Q86pR.jpg . Not really much more I can say about bathrooms really – I’m not an aficionado and if it does the job then it’s fine for me.

Because the other bathroom is at the back of the house and this one is at the front, we had to install a new soil pipe. Fortunately we didn’t have to go outside my boundary line to access the central sewer line or there’d be a whole load of extra work and paperwork but it was still no walk in the park – the earth piled up against the wall is what had to come out of the ground. http://imgur.com/I95Pd.jpg

So that’s it basically. I can’t claim that it’s the best kitchen and bathroom reno in the world but I’m happy with it and the price is right!