Home Again: After Two-and-a-Half Years, Teardown is Complete

Advice for those brave enough to invest in home improvement.

By NANCY KEATES THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

It's a wrap. Thirty months after making the decision to tear down and rebuild, my husband and I have moved into a brand new house on the lot where we lived for 10 years. Moving into a new house is like coming home to a gift–though one we will pay dearly for every month.

The new house is 1,000 square feet bigger and 50% more expensive than we initially planned. And the housing crash and the recession have made the decision much riskier. But being intimately involved in the design and construction of our home is an unparalleled experience–and a challenge I would gladly take on again.

We now have a house big enough (five bedrooms, three bathrooms) for our two sons to run around in the winter when the rain in Portland makes playing outside difficult; and we have a guest bedroom where our parents and friends can stay.

For this final Teardown Diary column, I offer lessons learned and advice for future home builders and renovators still willing to invest in home improvement in this uncertain environment.

Assume the final bill will be at least 50% more expensive than the initial calculations. Even though most home-building books and Web sites warn this will happen, it can be hard for novices to believe that individual cunning or just plain frugality can't make an exception. It isn't just one aspect of the process that causes the bloat. It is everything from the design getting more ambitious, to the price of materials going up and dealing with miscalculations by a contractor or architect. Cost overruns also come from the little decisions adding up: When faced with an option of slightly more expensive but significantly better performing fill-in-the-blank (water heater, windows, alarm system, etc.) most people choose to upgrade.

Decide if you want an architect who is passionate about the project. Our architect, Dave Giulietti of Giulietti Schouten, is said by other architects to be one of Portland's best. He did an excellent job explaining the design steps, figuring out what we wanted through an extensive questionnaire and helping sort through our wants and needs. The house he designed for us is beautifully sited and exactly what we asked for (though we all could have worked harder to keep the size down). (See photos.) The rooms are proportioned so they aren't too big or too small, the ceilings are high enough (10 feet on the first floor) without feeling cathedral. Whenever the contractors had a question or some detail wasn't fully worked out, Mr. Giulietti stepped in to take care of it.

The new house (right) is on almost the exact same footprint as the old house (left). It is just two stories taller. The yard and landscaping did not change.

But we never felt Mr. Gulietti's heart was fully in our project. His firm handles all kinds of architecture, but its pride is its contemporary designs. Drawing a Colonial–what is essentially a "period piece" as one worker called it–isn't his dream. A week after our home was finished, a card came in the mail from his firm advertising its new and in-progress projects. They were all modern and there was no mention of our house. Mr. Giulietti's response: "I certainly enjoy designing modern houses more. But the mission that I built the firm on is to provide good design and architectural services to our clients, no matter the size, budget and type of project…" Passion in an architect can make the project more exciting. But it has a downside: Sometimes architects take over and don't listen to the client's needs, resulting in a design and a final price that is way off base.

Check the contractor's references. It is amazing how many people are told that the right contractor is the keystone for the building process–and they still don't check references carefully or ignore previous homeowners's complaints. All the self-help books on building and renovation say the most important decision is to find a good contractor. We asked everyone we could find who had used JDL Development and never heard a bad word about them. They came through for us 100%.


Of course JDL isn't cheap–they charged us a 17.5% fee. It is possible to find contractors who charge a lower percentage or a fixed price. But in my opinion it is more cost effective to splurge on the security of knowing that someone is looking after every little detail to make sure it is done right than to scrimp on the contractor and spend more on materials or finishes. Our project managers, Dave Lyons and Ron Boersma, built our house as if it was their own. Now, four weeks after move-in, Ron has been available to help solve problems like the squeaking garage door and an incorrectly placed shower head.

Read the fine print of the loan agreement.Some readers gave me a hard time when I ("a financial journalist!") complained I didn't know when I signed our loan--which covered construction through to permanent financing, or home mortgage--that the bank could change its mind and not extend the loan amount it said it would. We didn't see the final contract until we were in the title office, faced with hundreds of pages of tiny type in unfamiliar language punctuated by dollar amounts that didn't always add up. It was confusing and frightening and I would never go into that again without the help of a real estate attorney.

When the housing market tanked and credit froze, banks started changing their lending guidelines. We worried the appraisal of our property at completion would show its value had declined from the initial appraisal because of the overall drop in housing prices.

Luckily the value of our home actually increased and Wells Fargo came through, extending a 30-year fixed Jumbo loan for 6.5%. It is higher than some Jumbo loans out there. One mortgage broker said if we could get that rate for a Jumbo we should take it; another said he could find us one for 6.25%. But we had started the process with Wells Fargo, formed good relationships with the loan officers and had already handed over reams of financial statements. Others haven't been as lucky, getting stuck with construction loans they cannot convert to permanent financing.

Ask anyone and everyone about their construction experiences. It was by accident one evening at a cocktail party that two women told me how bad window installations had caused leaking and structural problems in their new homes; they gave me a list of questions to ask my contractor. It turned out the subcontractor had cut some steps in installing our windows.

I quizzed neighbors and friends who had built or remodeled their homes about their mistakes and good decisions. One sat in on a meeting with me between the contractor and the heating and air company to determine the best system for our house. She also took a look at our initial design and suggested moving the first floor playroom to a part of the house where the mess they inevitably create wouldn't be visible from the front entry. Another friend pointed out that the color options the designer had chosen for our walls were not the kinds of colors I had really liked when I showed her magazine cuttings. She spent hours with me finding just the right hues–and also gave me all her favorite lighting catalogues.

This kind of sourcing can go beyond acquaintances. When I saw a new house built to look like an old Colonial in another newspaper, I called the architect to get the exterior paint color. Just one call to the owner of a pretty home on a design blog on the Internet opened up a new world of tiles. Confused by conflicting information from different types of insulation manufacturers prompted a query to the government agency in charge of testing insulation.

Don't be afraid to read and learn about subjects that seem intimidating. When we first started, as I wrote back then, I didn't know the difference between a Colonial and a Tudor. I certainly didn't know about the existence of on-demand water heaters or that most home insurances won't cover for earthquakes if you have a slate roof. I learned: For example, it is necessary to understand how different types of insulation work in order to make the cost benefit decisions that will work best for your budget and your house. Different roofing materials are appropriate for different climates and environments. An on-demand hot water heater might or might not make sense for the way your family uses water.

The same principle holds true for design decisions. There may be some innate talent in choosing how one color plays against another in the placement of living room furniture. But there's also a logic that is learnable; and the more you study it, the more you understand.

Read, study, ask, listen, watch–those are the golden rules of home building. The other truism is that the first time is just practice. Now we are really ready to build a new house.

Rip Out. Remodel. Repeat.

By Teri Karush Rogers, New York Times

KELLY GIESEN is three months into her second New York renovation in five years — a 10th-floor one-bedroom across the street from the American Museum of Natural History — and she is already dreaming of taking on another, bigger project in the same building. This is on top of the three renovations she did in Baltimore over the previous 10 years. Ms. Giesen is well acquainted with the unpleasant side of home remodeling, like her recent two-day stint scouring blackened porcelain in the bathroom and vomiting in reaction to chemical fumes. And she admits that renovation “definitely disrupts your life a little,” preventing her, for example, from bringing home a potential boyfriend.

Still, she finds the process invigorating. “I would never buy a ‘done’ apartment,” she said. “This way I get everything I want. I like to do it from soup to nuts.” Each day of a renovation, she added, is like a treasure hunt. “Sometimes you’ll come home and the doors have been done or the floors are done or the ceiling has been chipped back,” said Ms. Giesen, 40, who works in marketing and sales at Pfizer in Manhattan. “It’s the hint of progress: I’m one step closer to getting into this bathroom.”

As torturous as home renovation is for most people — its pain is often likened to that of childbirth, and most of those who go through it avoid doing it again for years, until the worst memories have faded — there are some, like Ms. Giesen, who cannot get enough of it. Like the people who move from Botox injections to eyelifts to cheek implants, there are renovators who become more than a little compulsive about the work they are doing, and who pursue their ideals through a never-ending series of projects.

“When you’re in the middle of one you’ll swear you’ll never do another because every house has its problems,” said Greg Kristiansen, 41, an interior designer at the Hunt & Gather home furnishings and accessories store in Portland, Ore. Mr. Kristiansen has redone a half-dozen homes in the past decade. He and his partner, Jerry Hagerman, 41, a contractor, are almost finished with their second project in 10 months. Mr. Kristiansen said he loves hearing praise from neighborhood residents when a house is done. “And, of course, you sell it for three times what you paid,” he added.

“For me it’s always been this elusive concept of getting it right,” said Christopher P. Wilson, 47, a director of operations for the Manhattan real estate firm Stribling & Associates, who has been renovating every 18 to 36 months since he was 23. With each project “you think you’ve been cured of the bug and this is the one you’re going to get perfect,” said Mr. Wilson, who is finishing a house in East Hampton, N.Y., and a condo in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. “But you move in and nothing is ever perfect. It’s almost like an addiction you can’t shake.”

“Almost” may be putting it mildly. Most of the decorators, architects and contractors interviewed for this article said that serial renovators are far outnumbered by serial decorators, for reasons having to do with budget and time constraints. But they also said that the numbers of both groups had multiplied in recent years along with the explosion of home-improvement magazines and TV shows, the real estate boom and the heightened nesting instinct that many attribute to the social anxieties since 9/11. And there was agreement among many that some serial renovators go too far for their own good.

“I’ve had a few clients over the last 20 years that basically, as soon as you’re done, they say, I’m going to live with this for six months and then change it,” said Lee J. Stahl, the president of the Renovated Home, a design and contracting firm in New York. The life expectancy of a high-end kitchen or bathroom is about 20 years, he said, but some clients are not interested in waiting even a fraction of that. He recalled one who asked him to “rip out” a bathroom that had been remodeled for $75,000 less than a year before. Like a plastic surgeon, he said, in cases like this he sometimes has “to say no, there’s nothing wrong with their nose,” even though “they might go somewhere else — they might go to someone more driven by the dollar than the reality.”

The serial renovator does not seem to fit any single profile, but Mr. Stahl said he has observed patterns among the renovators he encounters in his work. They are often creative industry types, he said, typically between their late 30’s and mid-50’s. Many have never had children or are empty-nesters, he added; the all-consuming needs of a child can impede the impulse to build.

Theories about the causes of serial renovation abound. Mr. Stahl cites the need of certain people to “make sure they have the latest and greatest thing all the time,” but also the social dimension of the habit: “They’re bored. They become attached to us; they don’t view us as contractors. They view us as their inner circle.”

Irene S. Azar, a Manhattan psychotherapist, sees a link between the serial renovator’s need to “do it over and over again” and the compulsive behavior of other groups — workaholics, say, who use work to avoid addressing festering issues in their lives. (And, as with other compulsive behaviors, the patterns may form early: many serial renovators, including Ms. Giesen and Mr. Wilson, said they moved frequently during childhood.)

Ms. Azar is echoed by Heidi Semler, an interior designer in Portland, Ore., who has observed that “there are a lot of people who may have other things in their lives that aren’t working who put a lot of energy into making their house perfect.” And Kevin Harris, an architect in Baton Rouge, La., who says he has worked on some 380 renovations in the last 25 years, has often noticed how seductive and addictive the cause and effect aspect of renovation can be for his clients. “You can get up in the morning, talk to the carpenters and say, ‘I’d like this to be done,’ and when you come back it’s framed up and you feel like it’s the pyramids — it’s that power, that rush,” he said.

MS. GIESEN, certainly, seems compelled by that daily one-step-closer feeling, and by the larger drama of transformation involved in renovation. “It’s taking something that’s awful and turning it into something beautiful,” she said.

When she visited her new apartment with a friend in April, just before the closing, they found towers of junk, a stomach-churning stench and “thousands of roaches” (in addition to the dead ones stacked six inches deep in the cupboards). “It looks like a crime scene,” the friend remarked about the dwelling in the otherwise pristine building.

But Ms. Giesen went ahead and paid $700,000 for the place, and set about transforming it into what she says will be a soothing taupe-and-cream throwback to old Hollywood glamour, with a mix of French-style antiques and contemporary details like the rippled linen curtains that will hang around her bed on a ceiling-mounted track. (Her last project, a studio down the hall, consumed $75,000 in renovation costs and months of her life, and was recently featured on HGTV’s “Small Space, Big Style.”)

Ms. Giesen strives to live as stylishly as possible during her renovations. On a recent Sunday the apartment was an orderly shell of primed drywall and masonite-protected wood floors, with a faint scent of Verbena home perfume by L’Occitane in the air.

Lining the walls of the living room and the dining area were nearly two dozen architectural salvage pieces, including a five-foot mirror with egg-and-dart molding rescued by a salvage store from the Plaza Hotel, arched French doors, four antique Venetian mirrors and a pair of tall wood and plaster pilasters, all collected in the months before the renovation began in April. Ms. Giesen took hold of a pilaster and demonstrated how she moves the objects around like gigantic chess pieces, rocking them back and forth on each corner, in a continuing effort to see where each belongs. Like many serial renovators, she describes renovation as an important creative outlet in her life.

So does Greg Matusky, a child of unhandy parents and the president of the financial communications firm Gregory FCA in Ardmore, Pa. “The whole act of creating is really liberating,” he said, adding that the renovation process also seems to have a rejuvenating effect on his marriage. “I read a book once that said there’s different ways to be a couple, and one strategy is to be a partnership,” said Mr. Matusky, 45, not elaborating on what the other strategies might be. “Home renovation is a real partnership between my wife and I. Our relationship is never as good as when we have a renovation project going on.”

Mr. Matusky, who said he was obsessed with the home remodeling show “This Old House” in his 20’s, bought his first house in 1987 and spent six years renovating it. He bought his second “utter disaster,” a five-bedroom English Tudor in Ardmore, a Philadelphia suburb, with his wife, Judy, a part-time dietician, in 1993; they spent more than a decade replacing all the wood floors and subfloors, putting in a new kitchen, redoing the basement, turning the side porch into a family room, building a backyard gazebo and a cedar tree house, and installing a stamped concrete patio.

This year the Matuskys completed another extensive renovation of the same house, this one for $200,000, which included a family room and another renovation of the kitchen that extended it into the old garage.

For three months they lived in the basement, along with their three teenage children and a large Crock-Pot.

His wife, who said she enjoys the teamwork of renovation and is happy to have him at home instead of on the golf course, nevertheless stopped short of his blithe assessment of all the work. “After a couple of weeks trying to eat in the basement, that gets old pretty quickly,” she said.

Indeed, while many couples view serial renovations as a way to become closer, said Mimi Maddock McMakin, the owner of Kemble Interiors in Palm Beach and Manhattan, others can wind up in therapy. And Ms. Azar, the psychotherapist, said she had seen apartments become power struggles, as renovations led to discussions of money and the “different ways they want to live.”

And even when spouses are in full agreement about the value of renovation, other family members may not be. Salita Armour, 48, a serial renovator and real estate flipper in Austin, Tex., says she has remodeled 26 houses in 26 years. Her husband supports her in her habit, she says, largely because of its profitability, but also because of his own hunger for novelty. (Ms. Armour said he switches cars every four months.)

But the couple’s 17-year-old son, Shane, said he finds the construction process, which his mother clearly enjoys, “kind of lame, because you know how slow it is.” He added that he and his sister “have grown up like this, so it’s not like any big deal, but it’s kind of a pain in the butt moving all that stuff again and again.”

Matt Tarlow, the 31-year-old son of Shannon Brown, an interior decorator in Portland, Ore., had a stronger reaction to his mother’s ceaseless renovating. By her account, Ms. Brown, 60, moves and renovates every 9 to 36 months; seven times in the last 10 years. When he was growing up, Mr. Tarlow said, “we’d stay at a place for maybe two years, three years if we were lucky.” Then, after he was in college and she divorced, “one lasted six months,” he said. “It got to be such a joke with everyone around Christmas and Thanksgiving that we’d take wagers” about how long Ms. Brown might stay in one place.

The chaos caused by one renovation led to a year of strained relations between mother and son, said Mr. Tarlow, who, although he sells real estate in Los Angeles, calls himself a stable renter.

Ms. Brown, for her part, is philosophical about the effects of her habit on her family. “The only regret I do have is I do think probably there were times this was hard on my kids,” she said, though she added that she moved 9 or 10 times as a child and always found it kind of exciting. “As a parent, you have your life,” Ms. Brown said. “It’s basically what I do. I’m a nomad. Once I get half done with something, it’s not that I lose interest, but once you know exactly what it’s going to look and feel like, you see something else and go, ‘Look what I can do with that!’ ”