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I'm looking at a 10 acre wooded property near Dayton, OH. It's a for sale by owner and the owners have it priced very reasonable. Currently there is a 1486 sq foot brick ranch house with a full basement underneath. Attached to the one side of a house is a car port that has direct access to the basement via a man door and single car garage door. The car port looks like it's an adhoc job as it has i-beams criss-crossing each other and a poured concrete patio above it. The concrete floor of the carport is all cracked up. If I bought this property, what I would like to do is tear out the car port and patio that is above it and put up a garage with a room above it. The way the land slopes, the garage would be at the basement level and the room above it would be at the main level and just an extension to the house. The house is 26' wide so I'm thinking of making the garage/room extension that wide and maybe 22' or 24' long. Above the garage I would want to put in a master bedroom suite that consisted of the master bedroom, a walk-in closet, and a bath with a walk-in shower and whirlpool/soaking tub. It would have average materials in; nothing really high end. Where there is currently a single car garage door, I'd like to wall that back up so the only entrance to the basement through the garage is via the man door. Since I don't own the property, it would be hard to get people to give an estimate. Does anyone have a ballpark idea what something like this would cost? A friend of mine is concerned that with all of the rehabs I want to do to this place, it may be cheaper to build new or look at other properties. In addition to doing the garage/room extension to the house, I was planning to rehab some of the main house to include converting part of a smaller bedroom to a laundry room and then extending the living room to take up the rest of the space of the smaller bedroom. The walls being moved/changed are non-supporting. Then I plan to update the flooring, cabinets/counters, windows, and doors in all of the house.
I agree with the OP's friend -- it is almost certainly going to be cheaper to find a home that has the space you need than to start with major changes to an exceedingly small and likely outdated home. It is easy to get mesmerized by larger parcels but the fact is such sites are often hard to finanance, costly to maintain and very poor long term homes. Even in areas where there is demand for larger parcels the trend is for these sorts of sites to take much longer than average to find a buyer.
Complicating this is the OP is in a part of country that is not doing well economically, even if they pay all cash for this there is not much hope of others finding the income to ever he able to pay what the OP may end up sinking into this -- they'd never get their money out.
Find something that is closer to what you want. Maybe a place that needs some updating, not massive changes / additions.
Unfortunately I am looking for larger parcels because of having horses. For a small horse farm, 5 acres is a bare minimum and around 10 acres is more ideal. The thing that attracted me to this place is the fact that it's about half the price of finding a home with little to no rehab needed, which gives me roughly $140k-$150k to play with rehabbing it. But if rehabbing it will cost that much, then I'm no further ahead...
Have a contractor go out to the house with you and give you a rough estimate. It'll give you a ballpark idea of cost. You don't need to own a home before having someone give you a very basic and non binding estimation of renovations.
Have a contractor go out to the house with you and give you a rough estimate. It'll give you a ballpark idea of cost. You don't need to own a home before having someone give you a very basic and non binding estimation of renovations.
In my experience there are many contractors that are neither very accurate with estimates nor particularly concerned about that their inaccurate estimates often lead people to make unwise decisions. It is not uncommon for estimates to be way way off -- often on the low side. It makes sense to understand that things like moving around walls and having multi-level additions, even when done with "average materials" will generally be more costly than "starting from scratch" -- all the time it takes to relocate the existing plumbing, electric, HVAC is essentially "undoing" work that in new construction would not be needed...
Everybody needs to make living any a contractor that has nothing else lined up may have an incentive to make an estimate that is far below what the total project likely will cost so they get at least get paid to get started and if the new buyer goes broke before things are finished that is not really the contractor's problem.
To be sure, there are honest contractors that will do their best to make a complete and accurate estimate. Of course if the OP knew such a gem they would not be of the interwebs looking for advice.
Most contractors around here will usually only provide free estimates if you own the home. I talked to some friends last evening who I knew had some work done and had actually used contractors recommended from Angie's list. I decided to give a couple of places a call to see what kind of information I could find out. Both places were very willing to take a few minutes to talk to me and after hearing what I wanted done provided quotes of $65k-$75k. They said they could provide a concrete estimate once they saw the job site but they said their initial estimates were probably fairly close.
Building a new house was an idea. With a new house, I wouldn't want to go over $150k - $160k. The most affordable and reputable builder that I know of around here is TK Constructors. Even with them, it's almost hard to keep within that budget. I know there are also some reputable modular home builders (not manufactured or mobile homes) but I don't know if they would be any cheaper.<br>
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Not the worst idea, but not without problems...
