We reno'd our entire house and were holding our breath that we wouldn't run into any unexpected issues. The only thing we ran into was that the supporting floor joist between the DR and kitchen had been put in incomplete and the floors on either side were beginning to slant towards the joist. Fortunately it was an easy fix as the floor joist just had to be replaced and it was done up through the underneath carport.

Our whole reno was caused by a leak in the inlet valve to our DW. When we got home from vacation in summer 2010, we discovered that the lower kitchen cabinets and kitchen and dining room floors were all ruined. So it was all unexpected expenses!

Rerouting the plumbing led to the discovery that not only was our main drain leaking under the basement slab, but that our neighbors sewer line ran UNDER our house and it was leaking too. Needless to say, that ate up quite a few $$$.

With ours, when they demoed the back of our house, the found a lot of rot running along the sill plate and beyond. It cost $1,200 to fix.
The first day the plumber arrived, he went in our bsmt and looked at some overhead plumbing(had been fully exposed all the time) and told us that was a code violation and that cost was $1k to straighten out.
Then, there was the extra cost to pay the architect to re-draw our plans when he screwed up the direction of the beams in our attic. He had guessed wrong in which direction they ran rather than walk over to them in our stand up attic. His excuse was we took a door and window off the plan as well, but the town inspector specifically said in front of the gc and me that he needed plans redrawn only because the beams were wrong and the work got done differently than the plan because of that. Erasing the door and window was a few clicks of the mouse. Redrawing the structure had to be done. Grrrr....

We also got charged extra for the icemaker line, the extra outlet for our separate fridge/freezer (which the gc had clearly seen prior to the estimate/contract), restoring cable to our bedroom after extending, putting an extra switch in the hallway based on new code saying each bedroom needed a hall switch within a certain distance, the extra drinking water faucet hookup, etc... Basically, we got hosed by the gc who knew about all of these things in advance yet hit us with change orders.

We were actually lucky to find the leak behind the wall in the kitchen. We found it during the demo when they pulled out a lower cabinet. The out pipe from the kitchen sink meets the out pipe from the bathroom sink above the kitchen, but across the room. There was a slow leak in the joint. The floor and the 2x4s had been rotted. Had we not found this now, it would have been disastrous later on. Then we had an electrical problem, again would have been worse later on. Then to make things worse, I had a $1000 dental bill, not covered of course. We needed 8 snow tires and 2 car repairs for $2000. All in one week. Yikes!!!

Dianalo - you scare me. Town of OB? My plan is being redrawn now, but I wonder how the town will handle it. Variance involved.

Additional expense of filling a space between cabinets.
Let me preface this by saying that we did not know the cost of cabinets/appliances at all. The last refridgerator I bought 10 yrs ago was a $400 hotpoint...
Well we bought 3/4 ply maple cabinets from a savage shop(was display model I think)$1000 and a used GE profile bottom freezer refridgerator $700. All the cabinet estimates I had gotten were for 9-10K , and you know they always add on costs.Since we had to make the cabinets fit I had room for a built-in all refridgerator (more practical than wine cooler) between two cabinets. Very happy about this until I discovered the cost and had to break it to my sweetheart. I just bought it tonight and it cost almost as much as the cabinets and large fridge combined. Didn't realize these undercounter appliances were luxury...like everything else today.
All his flaxseed, almonds, walnuts, milk, yoghurt can go in there so he can keep out of my way in the morning(I'm like a bag of weasels in the A.M), it's also good for the dinner's groceries. If it works well, I'll forgive the cost :)

Dilly - the architect was the reason we had to have the plans redrawn. He had had to redraw them 5 times this go round to even get our variance, and that was before finding his biggest error. I can't blame the town for asking for new plans because the ones we had did not match our house. Of course, the gc should have noticed the mistake before the roof was ripped off last Dec.. I guess 2 grown men were too scared or lazy to go into our attic that dh, I, and our 2 young sons had no problem going into and walking around....
I am sure you won't have a fraction of our problems because chances are you are dealing with competent professionals.

One thing that was additional on ours was discovering a whole other "landing" under the mud room. I had long suspected the door between the kitchen and mud room had been the original back door. I had just assumed the mud room floor was the original back deck. Turns out that when they ripped up the mud room floor because one corner was rotting (from having the old icebox refrigerator standing on it for decades), they found the remains of the *original* back stairs landing for that door. They had been torn up and piled up in some sort of rubbish heap.

It felt kind of nice to be proven right about what I had long suspected, even though it cost some additional hours work for them to remove the heap o'stuff.

--Lee

waterdsmage - didn't your homeowners' insurance cover at least the floor and lower cabinets, plus furniture, etc.? My inlaws had a broken washer hose one night which flooded most of the house. The furniture and kitchen cabinets were OK, but the new Persian rug was a goner (I'm still crying it was so beautiful and unusual) as were the lovely oak floors. The insurance paid out around $70,000 on that job. Yikes!! This is a 2 bedroom, 1 bath, 1300 square foot house we're talking about and those were 1985 prices.

Oh lord. That was my biggest budget eater. I knew going into the project that my 1920s home was going to have some serious issues but little did I know how much it was going to cost to fix. All in all I ran up about $23,000 in structural repairs to the kitchen and dining room area which included new joists in the ceiling (which had been cut nearly all the way down), rerouting piping, installing new supports, and basement ceiling restructuring to hold up the new kitchen and make the floor flush. The inspector came by and told me I was lucky the bedrooms and bathrooms above the kitchen hadn't fallen through to the basement. Luckily I did not have any major bug problems or anything like that. Overall I am happy that the structural issues were fixed because now the house is in much better condition than it was before. But WOW was I shocked at the amount of stuff needed. And believe me it was NEEDED. But phew did it turn out to be a whole lot more than I was originally budgeting for.

termites

new tankless water heater to work around venting issue

GC fees due to code changes (lead abatement, arc valt protectors in bedrooms)

major unpredictable and totally ridiculous screw up by cabinet maker which required total rebuild of cabinet doors and drawer faces

new countertop fabricated due to error on #1 (GC had to absorb this cost)

had to move floor vent during construction

project not over yet but hopefully this list is complete...

We haven't started demo yet, but I often wake up sweating thinking about what happens when they remove the old cabs (get rid of peninsula and add island)....we intend to keep the old hardwood floor...we love it, very rustic with walnut plugs! We have been told it can be easily patched, added to the pantry area we are removing and then refinished.......I keep having nightmares they can't fix the floor and I have to pay for a new floor!

Christine, if your floor experts say they can match, patch, and refinish, they probably can. In our case, we weren't using a GC and the floor issue was a total surprise. Who knew that cabinet footprints weren't a standard size? Or maybe they are, but the standard has changed in the last 40 years. I must say that we love our new bamboo flooring and that I'm *so* glad to get the wall to wall out of the living room. Don't love the unexpected expense, but we are fortunate that we could absorb it when we needed to. There were years in our marriage (maybe 30 of them) when that hit would have tanked us. That's pretty much why we had cabinets that were 40 years old in the first place. That's also why we had the confidence that we could do this project on our own except for stuff like re-wiring. We are masters of make-do and re-do.

Christine-

We had the same issue with an old walnut-pegged oak floor adjacent to the kitchen we wanted to expand. A wall was removed, new flooring was feathered into the old, and when it was refinished, no one can tell the difference. As Suzanne said, if you have good subcontractors, all should be fine.
Pics are here on GW,if you are interested: ''Major kitchen remodel--Long and Pic heavy.'' There is one showing the new floor going in, a couple showing the finished floor.

Thanks to our great GC, our major unexpected expense was relatively minor. The blueprints for our 60 plus year old home showed that the wall we wanted to remove was not a supporting wall. Luckily, the GC was suspicious and checked before demo began. The beam that had to be installed was an extra $500 or so.

The stories some of you tell make we realize how lucky we were!!

$3,000 at the beginning of my remodel (pre-demo) to an architect who provided "drawings" without measuring, without regard to my budget, before I found this forum. The first drawing had the sink abut the cooktop. And 4" shelves. (??) And an insanely narrow walkway between frig and end counter run into basement/laundry. Without a lighting or electrical plan. Without plumbing plan. Etc.
I'd been trying to do my own drawings for months, coordinate my own contractors, understand things like lighting/electrical/ergonomic kitchen planning/ flooring installation. I finally decided it would be a simpler move to hire an expert to guide me and, especially, help me figure out what I did not know and was missing.

The contractors I showed the drawings to were incredibly frustrated. Then angry that I paid so much for them.

I posted the contract here. You all confirmed I got hosed!!

Ah well.

I have a fantastic contractor now - a perfectionist craftsman. :)

Smaller expense = electrician who neglected to install the proper voltage for my fixtures. Negotiating with him about fixing that.

Still learning as I go. And feeling much more secure with this forum as a resource!

I forgot the $1,800 when we downsized the plans from what the clueless architect drew on the first try. That plan came in $120k over budget, so we scrapped the project for several years after we had paid over $5k for something we could not afford.

Permit and expediter fees when the job ran on and on.

We had to renew the plumbing permit twice, plus swap out the GC/carpentry permit to a new firm when we fired the first carpenter, plus Dept of Buildings clearance/some nonsense I'm not quite remembering with the HVAC contractor (another mid-job firing/replacement). Renewal/change fees plus extra expediter costs added $1000-$1500 to our original "permits, fees, etc." budget line-item.

We are very slowly DIY reframing the roof and back wall of our home to be able to make the sunroom a part of the house rather than an "add on". There's decking in place now, but no actual roofing material. 4 days of rain (and snow!)over this holiday and a few of the tarps have developed wind torn abrasions. I have buckets under almost every light fixture on the back half of the house. The ceiling drywall of the greatroom was going anyway as we vault it, but we had hoped to harvest the insulation and reuse it. It's all a soggy mess. And the laundry room's and pantry's ceiling is toast too. I had hoped to keep that as is and use the extra height in the attic as more storage space instead of vaulting that ceiling. We'll now have to redo all of that, and most of the back wall because of water damage. It's not a lot of money in the long term, maybe another $500. It's more the mess and inconvenience and frustration at living in this mess and at how long this is taking. It's wearing on my nerves, and I knew to expect all of this as possible.

Vermiculite insulation between the first and second floors. Why...who knows. But it was $7,000 and a week to remove.

Once the ceilings were all down to remove the vermiculite my DH decided we were going to upgrade all of the hot water heating, wiring to the second floor and plumbing vents. Don't even want to know how much that cost, not to mention adding at least a week to the project.

One of the first things we did after moving into our previous home, a 1940's farmhouse, was to yank out disgusting blue shag carpeting in the bathroom. That revealed spongy wooden flooring around the toilet. Cutting out the spongy floor revealed rotted floor joists. Cutting out the rotted floor joists lead us to replace a partially rotted exterior wall sill. And the crowning touch was we found the toilet was no longer connected to the plumbing...the contents were just dumping on the ground (old house that sat empty for years.)

And I just thought the carpeting was bad!

We really didn't have a set amount for contingencies, but it didn't matter, it had to be dealt with. Now we almost always expect to find surprises when working on older houses. If nothing bad comes to light, we are pleasantly surprised, and money ahead!

Oh Mudhouse, I feel for you! I kept saying to DH that the back of the house gave me the same feeling that walking on a jetway does. Everyone thought I was crazy, that is until we jackhammered into a cavern created by all the leakage over the decades. No wonder the grape vines around the place were phenoms, all the water and fertilizer they needed - blech.

Clueless, the good thing is, once you have an unexpectedly (truly yucky) discovery like that, nothing else ever seems quite as bad. Lol about your happy grape vines, with their built in fertilizer and irrigation system -- !!

Ugh. A timely topic for me. Bear with me while I vent. So many things have been added and added and added. Can't wait until the drywall goes on ... hopefully then there won't be any more surprises that I have to gently break to my DH who is at his wits end with the budget!

We're mid kitchen turned main floor turned main floor and basement reno. Our house was built in 1964 and reno'd to some extent by the previous owner in the '90s. Our plan was to make the kitchen and main floor bathroom much more functional and a little bit prettier.

First we discovered major structural issues. In more than one place the supports for the load bearing beams were not only inadequate (two 2x4 rather than three?) but also only overlapping 1/4" (rather than the beam running past the support). Several of the floor joists for the second floor weren't supported anywhere, just floating. And one beam holding up the second floor was under engineered and bowing in the middle. Don't ask me how this passed a framing inspection! So out came the city engineers and we've essentially had to replace all the load bearing beams and supports in the house since repairing the main floor also required upgrading those in the basement.

With all the change in beams and support walls all the plumbing, heating, electrical and central vacuum stuff got messed with. The HVAC guy came to look at putting his bit back together. He assured me our furnaces were burning out with not nearly enough cold air. In order to make all this work we're having to replace the two older (but not that old!) furnaces with a new furnace (high efficiency at least ... guess it'll pay for itself eventually) and a bunch of new duct work. Cue more framing for new soffits and say goodbye to my wine cubby to make space for more adequate cold air returns. Also more removal of ceilings in the basement to have access to it all.

And in order to bring everything up to code we needed to replace/upgrade the electrical box. And then in doing so the electricians inadvertantly left the power off in our second floor (not under construction) AND to the fans for the furnaces. So our salt water fish tank (and corals and various invertebrates...) were all without heat to the water, and not even saved by the ambient temperature of the room. It was 11C (sorry my American friends, I can speak in inches but not in Fahrenheit, it's about halfway between room temp and freezing) in the house. It's not like losing a pet dog or cat but that stuff adds up in $$$! And we're still sad at the loss, not just the cost. Our blessed GC came ay 10pm on a Saturday night when we discovered the problem to help us restore some heat and power and offered to cover the cost of our losses there.

And since the basement is already ripped apart for the structural and HVAC improvements, why don't we do a couple more things we were going to do eventually anyway. Since it's already a mess.

I'm fortunate that we have the flexibility in our budget to cover the costs of the expanding project, and we are getting some things done that we wanted to do late anyway. But every time I come back to my DH with something new that we have to add I can see whatever enjoyment of the day turn to frustration. Our budget was flexible but not unlimited! And so we say goodbye to some travel plans and extras in the coming year. Not the end of the world. I'm very blessed to have a healthy family and equally fortunate that I have the opportunity do this reno at all. Add an amazing GC and great subs. What do I have to complain about? Nothing. But thanks for letting me vent! Somehow I already feel better!

sorry my American friends, I can speak in inches but not in Fahrenheit

For me, the interchange became easy when I realized:
C to F: Double it and add 30.
F to C: Subtract 30, then divide by two.

This gets you very close over a broad range. Your 11 C is actually 51.8 F. My formula gets 52 F.

Sorry about your fish/corals.