Last week we bought back our deck from the developers that purchased out old house and land. If you read one of my previous posts, Overcapitalization vs. Life Style, we paid about $20,000 to get the deck put onto our house a year and a half ago. Well, we just bought it back for $1000! Pretty crazy eh?
We have not yet been quoted on the removal and then re-installation costs by our builder, but it should come in at a lot less than the original $20,000.
We are having to be quite careful we go about renovating our house. You quite often hear about this issue when you look at spending any substantial amount of money on a house, so I wanted to put down some of what I think about it here.
For us it’s a bit of a balance between overcapitalising and life style. On our first house we spent about $20,000 on a deck that a few people, including my dad, told us was over capitalising. I think that if we lived anywhere else other than in the tropics they would have been right. Here in Townsville though the deck takes on the roll of a second living area and a true extention of our house, which is why we want to add one to the new house as soon as we can. For us this is a big life style issue
If we were purchasing this house with the plan to be out of it within only a couple of years then our plans would be significantly different that what we actually have. Our primary focus would be on getting the most financial return, or Return of Investment (ROI) for our money, rather than what we are going for, which is the best life style that we can have within our limited budget.
The article linked to below gives a bit of insight into what they think offers good return for investment with houses.
Tamara and I have been trying to work out a budget for our renovation. With the house lifting we have so far got 4 different quotes. They have a variation of about 35% and they all seem to cover the exact same things!
Raising and Restumping our house will, we hope, be the largest expense for our renovation. After that expense the next biggest will most likely be our deck and actually enclosing and building under the lifted house.
I have found that there is no company that will give us an exact price for lifting the house. They will usually give us some estimates but it’s normally accompanied with the statement “There could be some variation in that depending on …”.
Because of that it is quite hard to budget for the steps that we need to take in our renovation after lifting. We need to start booking people now as the contractors are so busy in Townsville, but it’s hard to know how many steps ahead to book since we don’t actually know how much money we will have to work with.
I read a good article about budgeting finances and time for renovations. You can read about it here: