Hi DIY folks,
I'm in need of a sounding board and this community has provided one for me on various topics so far. Sorry for the long post.
So here's the situation. In 2017, we bought land in the country with a decrepit century-old farmhouse. Our long-term plan is to go live on this land. The initial plan was to tear down the old house and build our dream house on the property. The revised plan, for environmental and monetary (maybe) reasons, is to keep the old house and renovate it as we believe it could definitely, with a lot of love, fill the needs of our growing family as it did for the numerous families that lived there before us. When we bought it in 2017, the house was a sh*tty mess that had been robbed of a portion of its plumbing and electrical wires. We spent
a lot of time making it livable again - new roof (the old one was leaky) cleaning up, re-flooring, interior paint job, and a bit of electrical/plumbing work, so that we could use the house as a vacation property for the first couple of years. My father, step-father, and I did most of it by ourselves (except the roof + electrical).
We had the house inspected earlier this year to make sure the foundations and structure are sound. I haven't seen the report yet but the inspector did not see anything alarming over the visit.
Here are the main areas that would require major renovations (we live in a cold and snowy climate):
- Zonolite/Asbestos removal from the interior walls (outsourced)
- While the walls are open, full electrical checkup and potential revamp (outsourced)
- insulate and re-finish interior walls (DIY)
- redo kitchen (DIY)
- redo sole bathroom + add vent (DIY)
- New outdoor siding and insulation (DIY?)
- New outdoor doors and windows for the whole house (DIY)
- Transform a cold portion of the house into a four-season livable space (partly DIY)
- Manage water around the house (DIY)
- cleanup + insulate + manage water in the basement (DIY)
I will outsource the Zonolite/Asbestos removal and electrical work as there's no way I want to risk my health with both. For the rest, given how expensive labor is and as we have somewhere to live in while the work is being tackled, I'm now thinking about doing it myself (with some help from my father and step-father) over a couple of months or a year, using a mix of vacation from work and weekends, or taking a sabbatical summer to do the work.
My experience with renovation work is still limited. I have a rental that I maintain myself but nothing major had to be done so far. I have no prior experience in most of the work areas I'd like to tackle in this project and am fully aware that it'll be a learning experience and will take me a lot more time to do the work vs hiring someone to do it. That being said, I always approached new projects with a DIY mentality: when I wanted a new computer, I decided to build it from scratch, learned how to do it on the internet, and am typing this post from it. Last year we had pigs and lambs, I decided to learn to do and did the butchering myself. My father and I did a complete landscaping revamp of my rental by ourselves a couple of years back. All that to say - so far I've proven to myself that I'm good at learning and enjoy self-teaching myself into things.
The plan is to take a couple of months to fully plan, prepare and budget for the various parts of the project while self-teaching myself how to do the work (with careful attention to the most critical parts), and then, when we are ready, pull the trigger and have the decontamination work done (very first step). I'm well aware that a century-old house comes with quite a lot of added complexity - the exterior walls are pièce-sur-pièce style, nothing is really level, we may find some or a lot of rotten wood when we open the walls, etc. We will have to avoid pitfalls and adjust a lot during the project, I assume.
Am I crazy to think that I can pull this off? Would you say I am taking a bigger bite than I can chew? Anyone here went through a similar project and has some experience-based feedback to provide?