So, as most of you know, I’ve been working on the homestead. When I bought the house in April, I realized that it was going to take some work. Now Im realizing how wrong I was. It wasn’t going to take some work, it was going to take a LOT of work. How much? Well, here’s an abbreviated list of things I have had to do or am planning on doing:

• Replace all carpeting in the house. Everything. On all floors. Every little bit. The existing stuff is simply, er, nasty. That’s what you get when you have four college kids living in the homestead.
• Replace all hardwood flooring. Granted, Im not going with true hardwood floors, but with a laminate (i.e. Pergo-like) flooring, but it’s still > 780sqft that has to be replaced.
• Renovate the basement. Again, basically the entire basement is being changed–including the demolition of most of the walls, and construction of new walls. This also means that the electrical and plumbing have to be redone.
• Extensive plumbing work to replace the existing crappy stuff (which has a tendency to leak after 20 or so years…since my house is 24 years old, well, it made sense to change it out while I could). Also discovered that the water heater needed to be replaced.
• HVAC work: this was a surprise I could have lived without…had to do some HVAC work, but even more worrisome, I was told by the HVAC contractor that the existing unit is “on it’s last legs”…and I have two of them. Replacement cost: $4500. Each.
• New kitchen. K. So this is something I definitely planned for. But still, it was hella pricey.
• All of the manual work I’ve had to do: from doing demolition work to building new walls, to laying down flooring and–the part I hated most–painting all the trim. Three times. Two primer coats and a final coat since I was painting over stained wood.
• Prep work–such as removing wall paper, existing light fixtures, etc. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated, since with the wallpaper, I had to go over every square inch of my walls three times to get it all off.
• The extensive patch work needed for my walls and ceiling due to the renovation work. And the unplanned for costs associated with that work.

And that’s just some of the items. So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that I padded my budget sufficiently so that I’m still not over budget. The other good news is that BB&T came to the rescue with a home equity line of credit…which has enabled me to not only do my renovations, but to do the vast majority of them *prior* to moving in. This means that the renovations I was planning to spread out over three years is being done, effectively, in three months.

So, things are progressing. Slower than I want, but still faster than what I expected. I’ll upload pics to Flickr soon to show the latest improvements.