What Do You Get For $625,000? - Whole House Remodeling

I was working with a contractor a few years ago who was remodeling homes and building room additions for clients who lived in a wealthy neighborhood. Most of our clients were between the ages of 30 and 45 years old and living in million-dollar homes.

The homes were about 40 years old and most of them needed to be updated, so why not put another room on or remodel the entire home. What the heck, these people had hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity, just sitting around. One of the homes that we worked on had a $400,000 budget and we weren't even one third of the way through the job, before they went over budget.

The original home was about 2500 square feet and by the time they were done it was about 3500 square feet. But for $625,000, this newly remodeled home had a state-of-the-art electronics and security system with a home entertainment area. Every room in the house had everything that you could possibly imagine cable TV, high-speed Internet access and a telephone line.

The entire house had new plumbing, electrical and heating. It now required two air conditioning condensers which needed to be okayed by the neighborhood. The city building department wanted more information on the air conditioning condensers, to make sure that they weren't going to bother the neighbors. That was a first for me.

When this house was finally completed, it was amazing. It might not have been a home that Bill Gates would have wanted to live in, but it was nice. State-of-the-art kitchens and bathrooms, made the home more enjoyable for the homeowners, who now had to make an extra house payment.

$625,000 buys you a lot of home remodeling and you better not forget that.

 

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