There are always surprises with remodeling.

A good friend of mine - an “old timer” homebuilder - used to always say that “contracting is a nickel dime business”. By that he meant that you really have to watch your costs whenever your building a house in order to not find yourself over budget because “things” always come up during the process.

We all know the kind of challenges that present themselves when building a new home. There can be supplier delays, subcontractor delays, bad weather delays, to name a few. But mostly, with new homebuilding,the problems you’ll encounter are pretty clearly identifiable right from the get go. I explain to our customers that this is not necessarily the case with remodeling.

As remodelers, we’re not building new, from scratch, every day. We’re dealing with existing conditions and taking that existing home apart before we can start to rebuild, which is where the surprises often come in.

Below is a photo of a “surprise” we found when we took off the plaster wall around an existing picture window in an older home in Boston. Our intent was to just reinsulate. However, when we opened the wall we discovered the existing picture window had been installed improperly into an opening constructed with no header to support the load. A big NO NO.

What a can of worms! The wall was now opened up, the insulation is about to go in, and then, the wall is supposed to be left open for a rough carpentry inspection by the building inspector. If that old window is left “as is” the inspection will fail because the window was installed wrong by a prior contractor. The homeowner was completely surprised, believing that everything was done properly and “by the book” by his former (and now not returning calls) contractor.

We see this happen with some frequency. That’s why it’s important to hire a competent, honest contractor to do your work. It’s all about trust. Once that wall was installed everything looked grand. But what skipped steps or sloppy practices may be lurking behind those walls?

Another example of a surprise is the metal plumbing pipe in the photo below. We discovered that the pipe was blocked by grease and coagulation that had been accumulating for 85 years in this 1930’s Newton home.

The homeowner explained that the bathroom was remodeled ten years ago. However, we soon learned that the last plumber hadn’t replaced the old drainpipes as specified but instead reused everything. While the fixtures and tile on the outside looked new, the inside was still 1930’s-an accident waiting to happen.

We ended up pulling it all out,causing more expense than the owner had anticipated.

The moral of the story is there are always surprises in remodeling. But, if you hire people who do the job right in the first place,there will be far fewer surprises.