re: Advice on living through a home renovation

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For those who have bought a house and done this immediately upon moving in, was it pure hell? Or did you space it out over months? Ideally I would love to get it all out the way in the first month. Should we plan to live somewhere else while this is going on or can we suffer through it for the duration of a semi demo/renovation?

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Do it room by room. I did this with my house and I simply used painter's drop cloths to act as partitions bewteen the room I'm working on and the adjacent ones and I used several 20" box fans with 3M Filtrete furnace filters to keep the dust managed. Now, I'm a geographical bachelor with a 4-bedroom/2-bath house so it was vastly easier with only one human to worry about vs. a SO or kids

I was a squishy little chubby bandie with highlighted (I’m naturally brown headed) blonde hair in those years. The only point those photographs would serve would be to pick on me, and I get enough abuse from my toddler right now.

Yeah I have several humans, two of which don’t tend to follow any rules and like to find ways to hurt themselves, to worry about.

I’m already starting to reconsider a renovation just talking about all of this. The idea of it is really exciting, but I’m not sure that it’s the best thing for this season of life.

With kids, I wouldn't do it. Without kids, probably not as bad as you think if yall both work outside of the house.

We added a master bedroom and bath to our house without leaving. Our kids were little and it was a challenge. Fortunately, the contractor was a good family friend and kept an eye out for the kids when they escaped.

Walls coming down means sheetrock work. That's a huge mess and something you really don't want to sleep exposed to.

Kitchen demo means no cooking.

Restaining floors means they either have to sand down the existing or strip, or both.

Flooring replacement could mean different things.

The best thing to do is get this done BEFORE you move anything into the house. Otherwise you will have to be moving furniture all around. Oh, and don't think that you can cover furniture and keep the sheetrock dust and sanding dust out.

Good friend of mine did this about 6 years ago. They never moved in until it was finished, but planned to in case they had to. He said he got a construction loan for 180 days, immediately drew down the asking price of the purchase and that transaction closed, and he would make draws to pay contractors as the work progressed. Interest only in the construction period, and then flipped the final amount of draws into a term loan.

They tackled the bathrooms first, then the kitchen. Wanted to at least get it livable if they needed to move in before the renovations were done. He's got a few kids so the idea of them all having to share a bathroom because only one was in working condition was something he wasn't going to do. He hired one plumber to do all of that first, then had an electrician for new wiring, and then some crew to get walls removed and installed, drywalled, and painted. Electrician came back to do new wiring and fixtures in the new walls before the drywall was put up. I don't think he ever had more than 2 different crews there at once.

Finally finished up with a floor crew. Old hardwoods that needed refinished but no use in doing that while painting was going on, no matter how neat the paint crew is. He said once the new appliances were in the kitchen and the bathrooms renovated, he listed his old house. If it sold, they were prepared to move in if necessary. And he was prepared to send at least some of the kids to grandparents house for a week at a time if they had to. All in all, he said he would do it again, but it is a lot of stress while you're working with different contractors, working full time, getting kids to school and activities, and packing up your house.