Control freak/ Stress Cadet's House Building Guide

Have any of you wonderful scorps (& dominants) built a house, or completed a major renovation... And how did you cope?

See, my conundrum is that I am the owner of a significantly damaged house... The repairs are estimated at $ 160K NZD and will basically repair every inch of the house.
Some of the work is structural- including lifting the house, removing the old foundations and installing new. Every wall and ceiling needs to be stripped and replaced. A couple of chimneys removed and/or repaired and other bits and pieces.

I have too many options and I am trying to eliminate a few- manage the repairs myself, sell it and leave all the decision making to someone else, or stay in the government repair scheme (which is likely to take another 3 years...)

So if you have built, did you find it stressful? Or once immersed in it did you actually enjoy the project. At the moment this is all theoretical and I can't decide if I want that amount of stress... But up until now I thought I'd love to build my own house!!!

Thank you for any and all contributions! 😄

My Virgo sun Scorpio rising ended up in the hospital for very high blood pressure do to a major home addition...

You should consider tearing the place down and building a new house in its place. When the foundation goes it is sometimes easier to demolish then repair.

OMG! shecomeundone- I think that would be nearly the most OCD combo ever! 😐

Elle- that does sound funny! Luckily I am doing this solo otherwise it would be ugly

MiamiV- that is another consideration... :S

oOOooh... and the cap can do a spreadsheet!

its a strange situation as half of the city are rebuilding so any of your mates in the trade are now very hard to catch up with for a beer and a chat 😉

I wouldn't be doing the work and breaking my nails- just bossing people round, and getting everything done my way!

Posted by cowpuncher
Scorpio Mars/Moon here, and an *ahem* Frugal *ahem* Cap sun.

I bought a house a little while back, currently waiting for the weather to warm up so that I and some buddies can do the necessary rehab it needs. It sounds like you bit off a much larger project than I did though.

My fold remodeled their house when I was a teenager. It was pretty stressful as I recall! Elle is right about expecting it to take 2-3x as long and cost about 2x as much as you'd like. You run into unexpected issues. One of ours was some 100+ year old oak timber that had to come out, that was so hard and strong after all that time... you could barely saw it, it would just eat saw blades. That's just one of many that were a major pain.

Another thing we ran into that you could fight: If this house is very old, concrete doesn't set up to it's full, final strength until it's about 80 years old. How old is your house's foundation? if you're going to have to fuss with that much, it could be a bear, even if it's got problem areas.

My little place was bought, in part, because I can easily afford the time and expense of rehabbing it. So I eliminated a lot of stress up front simply by limiting the size of my upcoming project. I HOPE it goes well. That said, I'm sure there are going to be some big headaches along the way. I'm allowing for them.

Good luck. If you really want to pick a good brain about this, Stoicgoat is your guy. Hopefully now that I've mentioned his name, like the devil, he shall appear.

yeah, right now it seems bigger than ben hur! The place is 80 years old- weatherboard villa, tin roof and all that jazz... So the concrete is probably half way to granite but unfortunately didn't stand up to the 14,000 earthquakes we've had in 3 years! Well, it was the 6 and 7 magnitudes that really shook it up.

I am more and more inclined to stay in the government repair scheme- as soon as they jack the house and tear off the walls there are bound to be more gremlins!

But it is so frustrating living in a broken house... At this rate it is likely to be the 5 year anniversary before I see any repairs done.

Posted by SwimmingLioness
I bought my house and moved it from one location to another, learned a lot, stressed a lot....still not completely finished with the place five years later. I took on this project alone, acting as general contractor.

The house is almost a hundred years old, but now has all new mechanicals and foundation/porches, roof shingles, etc.

I bugged every contractor imaginable with questions, in the end I knew what I wanted and stood my ground as much as I could. There are a number of things I'd do differently, knowing what I know now, lol, but that was inevitable!

The bottom line is I did sooo much thinking, planning and research and I knew it was the right choice. The doors of opportunity flew open and I walked through.

Leo Sun/Scorp Moon & Asc

My Aries Dad has been a tremendous help! Though we don't always see eye to eye 😉

Swimming, I can imagine you are a perfectionist! That seems like the mother of all projects!

I really want the government to do all the structural and building work and to handle all the finishing- wallpaper, paint, tiles etc... myself...

The girly bits!

Thanks swimming!!! Very wise words- and yes! I think my Leeb bits are going to have a hell of a time making up my mind about what I blooming want!