We are almost ready to close on the sale of The Rookie House, and we’ve finally finished all the accounting… (see budget comparison below)
While we were about 2.5% over budget on this one ($2000 over), I’m pretty pleased. About a week into the project, an air quality test revealed that there was a mold issue at the property; unfortunately, when you have mold in a house that’s torn down to the studs, you pretty much need to clean *every* surface to remediate it. This is time consuming, which ultimately means *expensive*. Luckily, we found a company that would give us a good price, but we quickly found ourselves $3000 over budget.
We made up for most of that by not doing hardwoods throughout the house, but in the end, we were still a little over our budget estimate.
Here is a detailed comparison of the estimated and final budget numbers:
I’ll have all the financial details on this project after we close — hopefully at the end of next week.
Hi J. You can do vinyl and carpet for a whole house for under $2K? How many square feet is that house?
Hey Kristine –
Here’s the more detailed breakdown on this house:
1. The house is small (about 1500 sf);
2. We put laminate hardwood in the entryway (about 100 sf);
3. The “carpet capital of the world” is about 90 minutes north of Atlanta (Dalton, GA). We can buy mid-grade (28-30 ounce) carpet and very nice vinyl from a direct distributor for about $4.50 per square yard, which is about 1/3 the retail price. So, with pad at about $1.60/sy and installation at about $4.20/sy, our total cost (labor and materials) for carpet and vinyl is about $10.30/sy, or about $1.15 per square foot. Add 10% for waste, and you’re looking at about $1800 for this house. Add tax (8% on materials) and delivery charges ($75), and you come to about $1950 for this house.
I have never encountered mold issues in any of the homes I have sold; however, I was under the influence that mold remediation was extremely expensive. I don’t think it was as expensive as I thought it was if it only put you an additional $1,000 over budget.
What process did they use to remediate the mold?
Terry –
The mold remediation and testing for this house was about $3000, which is on the high end of what we’d typically spend to remediate mold. Every house is going to be different and every mold remediator is going to have a different opinion on how to fix the problem. Generally speaking, there can be several different ways to get rid of existing mold, and different contractors may approach it differently — but still do an equally good job.
For this house, because there was no sheetrock and it was torn down to the studs, it was clear that there was likely mold on all the framing of the house. So, the remediation required a lot of manual labor (had there been sheetrock, the mold likely wouldn’t have gotten to the studs as much). So, the remediation process involved scrubbing the studs, spraying an anti-microbial and than dehumidifying the house for several days. The whole process took more than a week.
Terry, that is a misconception that I also had when I started doing this. Like J says the cost of mold remediation can vary greatly based on who you use and the amount of labor involved.
I have had mold remediation done where the work is just removing a couple of sheetrock panels, maybe some sanding and then treating the entire area with anti-microbial solution for less than a $1,000. Understand that there are also some seriously overpriced mold remediators out there.
Of course the first step always in mold remediation is removing the water source.