Show me the money!

There are several opportunities out there for saving money when renovating a house. For instance, we have taken serious advantage of store and manufacturer rebates.

Lots of places offer rebates..It’s usually $4 off your purchase of this or that, and most often I’ll ignore it because it takes weeks and weeks to get your $4 back, and lots of times it can be a fair amount of effort. We decided really early on that with as much as I’d be buying for this project, it would be well worth the time and effort to send in for rebate money.

For instance, if you remove the UPC codes from bundles of insulation and send them in with receipts to the utility company, you get a debit card loaded with money.

..not that I ever bought any insulation..

I used that to buy exterior doors… which qualify for an Energy Star tax credit. We also watched store advertisements and ended up buying durable, 25-year shingles A) at an 11% discount, and B) with an option for an in-store rebate. I then used that rebate money to purchase fiber-cement siding which – you guessed it – qualified for a $1 per board rebate. $1 per piece x 325 pieces means money for exterior paint. So, as you can see, I’m still shelling out good chunks of change for these things, but one purchase (and a little planning) helps to subsidize the next purchase, and on and on.

Many of the rebates described were in-store options. But, as I said, there are also manufacturer rebates from time to time, so pay attention to those.

There are also various services through local utilities – things like energy audits where they can show you where you gain/lose the most heat energy from your house. These services are provided free of charge to customers and, in my experience, they leave you with a ton of energy saver light bulbs and a new programmable thermostat. Bonus! The electric company has a program where you can turn in your old appliances for cash, assuming they still work. There was an old refrigerator in the basement. Boom - $50.

Another thing we’ve paid a lot of attention to is waste. Many professional jobsites will hang a 12’ sheet of drywall, cut out the openings, and throw the scrap away in favor of speeding through the project to get to the next one. While our methods are quite a little bit slower, our waste is quite a bit less as well. We use smaller pieces on smaller walls. It just makes sense.

We also took advantage of the scrap yard located in a neighboring town. When we removed the too-narrow water lines from the house early on, we took that copper to the scrap yard and paid for all the new plumbing with the proceeds. Because there was also a good deal of copper in the old wiring, we could cash that in to offset the costs of the new wiring. (Note: We took the time to save the old steel siding, sort it, load it in the truck, and drive over to the scrap yard only to find that they weigh it at aluminum rates…we used those proceeds to buy a sandwich.)

Look at all those rebates..

A really cool project I haven’t mentioned is my dining room table: we salvaged wood from the attic space of the old garage, planed it down, and made it into the most amazing table. We copied the design from Restoration Hardware..So, if anyone ever wants to buy it, I feel really confident knowing I could get $4,300 out of it ;)

I finished it with Tung Oil for protection thinking it would dry lighter colored.

It stayed fairly dark like this, but we've used steel wool to dull it slightly. With use, the color will fade over time as well.

Learned how to weld in the process! :)

Also, my family has always been into flea markets and antiquing and things like that. I take every opportunity I can to go and usually find good ideas for the house, if nothing else. One of the last markets I went to, I found a clawfoot tub that was in pretty good condition. I knew early in the project that I would like to have one, and had been doing research online. The going rate for the rusty old tub in grandma's barn was apparently $200, which I wasn't enthused about. But, I had planned to go look at some nonetheless. Then, at the flea market, I found a vendor who had a pair of tubs he wanted to sell. He said he'd been carting them around for a while and didn't have a lot of interest..and sadly, he was going to scrap them after that very event so he wouldn't have to load and unload them anymore. He said he could get $50 out of the scrap metal, so he would sell it to me for that - SOLD!

Here's the tub..all sanded and painted, waiting for it's feet. And a faucet. And water.

I’ve also been to and from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Des Moines a time or two. The ReStore is an awesome place, it’s open to everyone, and it’s inherently ‘green’ which is something I’m into. What it does is this: people who are doing home improvement projects (including contractors) who have leftover items can take them to the ReStore where they can be sold to someone else who needs that random piece of slate tile for their front entry, or that old front door to match the others in their old house. To my knowledge, donations are tax deductible (I took the old bathroom vanity, ceiling fans, closet doors, and a few other fixtures) and anything you’d like to buy is fairly priced. The proceeds fund the store which provides jobs to at-risk youth and others in the area. Very cool program – and they’re expanding their operations, so check them out!

http://www.gdmhabitat.org/about-us.php

There's still plenty of life in the old closet doors, vanity, and light fixtures!

Part of me wants to keep the old tiles from the bathroom. The other part knows someone else will use them better than I could, and it will help them in their renovation.

There is also the completely unending generosity that comes with living in a small town and having great friends and family. I have been so fortunate to have people come out and help me put this house back together, give me their old barbeques, or donate beer and pizza in their absence. All of it is much appreciated, and yet another benefit of living life right here in Iowa J

Playing Catch Up

Hello again!

In the time I’ve taken between updates, we’ve hit a stall in our progress. At the moment, we’re waiting on a coordinated effort among the cement contractor, the electrician, and the electric company. Getting everyone’s schedule to align (even without including my own schedule) is proving to be a slight challenge.

What we need is this: the current electrical meter is attached to the side of the house right outside my side entrance – when we built the garage addition, we thought it would be awfully nice to move the meter to the alley side of the addition and bury the line through the backyard so it’s both out of sight and out of the way. This is a matter of aesthetic preference and practicality – we need the overhead lines out of the way if we’re going to re-roof the back of the house, let alone reconfigure the pitch of the roof.

Once we have our trench dug (32” deep – which seems excessive to everyone but the City code), we can bury the connection from the existing breaker box in the basement to the new breaker box/meter in the garage. The new breaker will connect directly to the incoming power source and will run the circuits on the back half of the house. Running the circuits in the back of the house from the breaker box in the garage will save a small amount of wire/money, but will save more with regard to time and energy involved in installation.

At any point during this process, the electric company is supposed to be coming to remove the power from the house, trench through the alley and backyard and reconnect the power to the new meter box at garage’s new meter socket. (I learned that a meter socket is a fancy word for high priced metal box. It’s the housing for the dial that records how much power you’re consuming.) In speaking with the territory manager, I found that the power company we have locally will provide 25’ of trench and 25’ of cable free of charge. Anything past 25’ is charged to me as the homeowner, but the charge is pretty minimal when you consider I won’t have an overhead wire getting in the way of the goings-on at the jobsite.

Once the power shenanigans have been resolved, we can get to work on the roof.

I’m in the process of finding a new roofing contractor. The one I had contacted and verbally committed to has more or less flaked on me…which is unfortunate because I received a great bid from him. So meeting contractors starts again. It’s not my favorite part – they’re pretty quick to tell me I should’ve just built a new house. It’s unprofessional to stick out your tongue at someone, otherwise I might.

At any rate, we got a pretty good deal on the materials for the roofing project. Trusses conveniently went on sale and there was an 11% rebate on most other building materials – including sheathing, shingles, building wrap and all the other odds and ends we will need. So, in an effort to save money and a little time down the road, we bought most of what we’ll need in the near future and then some. I likened spending all that money to ripping off a Band-Aid…do it quickly and it won’t hurt as much..