DO’s and DON’TS for saving money on overseas remodeling

My wife is a naturalized US citizen who still owns a small house in her native land overseas which we use for vacations every few years and as a dormatory for several college age nieces and nephews.

Task: Remodel the house adding a new large second story bedroom onto the front of the house and ready the house for renting.

These are true experiences my poor wife went through a couple of years ago overseeing this work. I was only able to visit near the end for three weeks. She spent almost three months fighting through this. (It has been long enough now that I guess I can joke about it. A little.)

1. Hire your poor relations and other local villagers (mostly out of charity) to come to the big city to do part of the work. [NO. ARE YOU CRAZY??]

Watch them spend a week doing one of nine concrete pillars. (The plan is for a 5 week project, BTW.) Wife fires the foreman and takes over herself. Hires trained local craftsman at lower rates who get the other 8 pillars done in a few days.

2. Hire your new step mother’s brother’s friend to supply the floor tiles and workers. Pay him too much in advance. [DON'T EVER DO THIS.]

Pay his unpaid workers yourself so they don’t just sit around with the job half finished. Threaten to break the tile contractors legs if he doesn’t at least deliver the rest of the pre-paid materials.

3. When is your crazy neighbor lady waving a handgun at and scaring your workers a good thing?

When your nephew’s friend the architect has neglected to pay the agreed bribes to fast track the building permit out of his payment. (This is actually a good thing because your silly crazy neighbor _could_ have otherwise stopped the noisy construction just by informing the city of non-permit construction.) And also when she again waves the illegal military handgun, this time in front of a dozen witnesses AFTER the building permit has finally arrived: this time the police can be called to calm her down.

4. Have your father-in-law infuriate your wife by taking the side of the 5 times too expensive over-bidding cousin’s shiftless husband (C.S.H.) in a bidding dispute. [Another NO.]

Wife fired the kickback taking C.S.H. and hired local painters at 20% of the price for twice the quality. The C.S.H. won’t leave after being fired three times, each time louder. Get the old family friend’s husband (former prize fighter) to come evict him. Hire armed guard from cousin who owns a security company for several days to stand around the front yard during the night time.

5. Despite being twice over budget and three times longer than expected, enjoy a party in new patio area under lovely new second floor addition to house. [YES, DO THIS.]

Invite entire neighborhood in thanks for not causing trouble (don’t invite the crazy gun toting next door neighbor lady, however, because of the ongoing legal disputes.)

Full disclosure: my husband is a carpenter and he’s doing our renos.

That’s right. I suppose I should mention that our situation is a little different in that we have an owner’s agent who is also a family member, so when I say we, I mean him… Or something.

Are you sure? It seems like YMMV on this one. Contractors get discounts that the general public does not. Sure, contractors mark up the price of materials but then again, if you buy the materials for somebody they might mark up their hourly rate or bid rate to compensate.

At the IKEA cabinet price range, you are probably correct that it is cheaper for you to purchase it. But lighting at Lowe’s – I think contractors don’t have to pay sales tax – so it may pay to have the contractor buy it, take the markup, and have a happy contractor with a different hourly rate.

At the high end, I would say that you probably want your contractor to buy for you. There are good contractors that won’t work for you if you don’t let them buy. You definitely want to cost this one out carefully on a case-by-case basis.

We found that buying materials too far in advance caused a lot of problems because of storage issues. Better to wait until it’s needed to get it.

Mike