Truth: we didn’t mean to tear the house down. It was a 1950s home that started out as a four-sided brick, two-bedroom ranch style home – like so many others in the area. At some point it was remodeled – not by us – and became a three-sided brick with three bedrooms. We thought the brick and masonry would be re-usable and give a great, vintage look to the home, not to mention save money on construction costs. Our contractor agreed that we had noble intentions but, he said, in his experience, “we usually have to tear down homes like this.” We ignored his warning and he said he would do the best he could.

Thus began some of the most important lessons of this whole process of tearing down and re-building our home. In this third installment, I’ll share our greatest lessons from the demo and construction. My hope is that armed with our mistakes, you can make better – and cheaper – choices if and when you are in the same blessed phase with your home.  

So, demolition starts, all the interior walls are gone and upon a closer look we learned our bricks were not bricks but instead concrete cut to look like bricks. Worse still, the brick walls were free standing – not actually tied into the structure of the home – and thus totally useless. And, to add to the joy of this moment, all of this was happening with a hurricane bearing down on Atlanta. Seriously.

The roof was off, our home totally exposed with floating walls. What did we do? Braced the walls with studs while we were working through what to do, of course. Thankfully, the hurricane blew through and our home was still standing. But the surprises were still coming. Turns out the floor of our home had a three-inch slope. Okay, what do we do now? We talked through numerous options and decided to work with what we had. Then, the framers arrived.

Hearing that the floor had a three-inch slope, the framers refused to work with our troubled, slanted floor. So, our only choices as this point were to trash the fake brick and tear up the floors and start from scratch on all of it. That’s what we decided – as if we had a choice – and our contractor tore down our house, brick by brick, literally. And while he was doing that we were buying new masonry and lumber to the tune of $25,000 out of pocket.

Lesson #1 – When you hear your contractor say, “in my experience we usually have to tear down,” trust them, listen to their recommendation and save yourself some cash.

The upside to this lesson is that with no floors or walls, we had more freedom to make new choices; one such choice was to raise the ceiling height to nine feet. You know what I’m going to say next, right? Yep, you guessed it. The drawings did not include nine-foot ceilings, so from there, we had to piece together the rest of the house and change more things. That leads me to the next lesson.

Lesson #2 – You have to roll with the process.

We spent countless hours discussing options and making quick decisions and then waiting, waiting, waiting. Hurry up and wait. There are countless factors at play to get a crew to your house to work. There are the subcontractors, worker shortages, timing of materials, emergencies that happen on other jobs. So we were often faced with major decisions that had to be made ‘right now’ because a crew was on it’s way over to do the work; or “the electrician…plumber…fill in the blank… is on his way over to do the work now and won’t be back for two weeks, so we have to know now.” We learned, that’s the way it goes, you just have to roll with it.

Lesson #3 – Even though we were meeting often with the site supervisor, we still had to over-communicate every change not reflected in the drawings to make sure the memo got to the subcontractor.

For instance, the bathroom downstairs. In the drawings it had a pedestal sink but we changed it to a wall mounted sink. No biggie, right? Wrong. The plumber installed fittings for a pedestal sink…so we had to have it re-done, because we bought a wall-mount sink.

Or the lights in my office. The drawings had sconces in four places, but I wanted task lighting. No biggie, right? Wrong. Apparently task lighting has to be wired differently than sconces. Luckily our site supervisor took video of where the wires were so we knew where to put holes in the walls (insert slap to the forehead emoji).

We had to be on-site daily to make all of these and countless other decisions. And speaking of electrical, we had to make decisions on the installation of every single light fixture because apparently the height of a pendant, or chandelier or task light is not standard, but preference. This is where hiring a designer would be incredibly useful!

Lesson #4: When you hear the electrician is going to be onsite, go through the drawings with your site supervisor and review every decision that has been or needs to be made.

We revised some our lighting from semi-flush mount to can lighting. Well, the electrician didn’t know and wired those lights for semi-flush, because that’s what was on the drawings! We discovered this the day before the electricians came back to install all the fixtures, so I had to search every available lighting store in Atlanta to find lights… and we now have semi-flush light fixtures. Good thing, I’m rolling with it!

As you know, we moved into our home and are slowly getting settled. We love the house, boxes and all, and are so happy to be back. The kids started back to school last week so there’s a new sense of routine around here. And yes, the contractor is still calling to fix a few final things, but overall we’re happy and definitely relieved to be closing this chapter of our story.

Look forward to the fourth and final installment in a few weeks!

Thanks for reading,

Michelle

P.S. If you’d like to catch up, read Lessons Learned Part 1 and Part 2 also.