Rehab Math For Dummies

Here at "The Ranch", Jan and I are in full swing preparing to rip our house a new asshole.  Well, we're ripping it a partial asshole because we don't have the elebenty gazillion dollars needed to redo all of the 1980's out of our 23 year old home all at once.

This summer we are concentrating on completely tearing out and rebuilding our second bathroom on the first floor and replacing every fucking window in the house. In the past, I would have fearlessly tackled these projects myself, but fortunately for everybody, I went back to work and don't have the time.  And anyway, I can imagine the results would have the place looking like Jed Clampett's residence before he moved to Beverly Hills.

We hired a different contractor for each job.  The window guy appears competent, but was overly reliant on his many certificates and awards when he made his sales pitch to us.  At one point I thought he was going to whip out his Congressional Medal of Honor and his Order of Sainthood from the Vatican in order to seal the deal.  The bathroom guy is much more low key, but on our first pass at an estimate on fitting out the loo, where we were urged to "think big", big turned out to be five figures. And although our second and final estimate was a much more reasonable amount, it's still kind of pricey.

Just for fun, I thought I'd shuffle around some numbers and try to put a face on what we are spending to remodel a mere 40 square feet of our home.  Play along with me if you will.

In 1987, Jan and I built our home at a cost of 76 dollars per square foot.  Hey, not bad ... right?  If I were to take the cost of the bathroom remodel, divide it by 40 square feet and then take that number and multiply it by the total square feet of the house, then our house would be on the market today for ...

Let's see, divide by 13, carry the four, multiply by 2, add 2,123 and subtract the square root of pi.


Our house would now be worth approximately 200k above it's present market value, or well over 200 dollars per square foot.

Somebody is going to make money off of this house, but I have a feeling that it's not going to be me.

Once again ... I think I picked the wrong line of business to get into 'lo so many years ago..