I know nothing of the regs in the US, but most of the actual work in fixing something up is just common sense, having the right tools for the job and knowing when to call in some expertise - some things it just pays to get someone in who will do it ten times quicker than you can, which saves you money in the long run. I have fixed up 20+ places over the years, did all my learning in the process and wouldn't hesitate now if the right place came up, although if it is in that bad a state it can be cheaper to just pull it down and start again. Most building contractors will charge a fair bit more per sq.ft of extension than they will for new build because of the inherent difficulties in joining/matching etc, plus here in the UK you can claim VAT (20%) back on new builds, which is a big old chunk of change on a £200k build.

paulo
I know nothing of the regs in the US, but most of the actual work in fixing something up is just common sense, having the right tools for the job and knowing when to call in some expertise - some things it just pays to get someone in who will do it ten times quicker than you can, which saves you money in the long run. I have fixed up 20+ places over the years, did all my learning in the process and wouldn't hesitate now if the right place came up, although if it is in that bad a state it can be cheaper to just pull it down and start again. Most building contractors will charge a fair bit more per sq.ft of extension than they will for new build because of the inherent difficulties in joining/matching etc, plus here in the UK you can claim VAT (20%) back on new builds, which is a big old chunk of change on a £200k build.

Speaking of "pulling it down and starting again"......we were actually thinking about this as being a good choice. If I'm not mistaken, I think you only need 1 wall standing up to be considered a renovation whereas if everything was flattened down, it would be considered a "new construction" and the taxes are much higher.  

I tend to think, the only good house is an old house.
If it's old, it will probably need some work though. But, you usually know what you're getting. (Good inspections are crucial).
 
 
Take a nail, and hammer it into a 2x4 of a new house. Goes in like buttah..
Do the same in an older house and you'll usually bend the nail before you penetrate the wood much.
 
I just think that newer homes are built really cheaply with cheap garbage components. 
 
Mesh, since your father in law is a contractor, that puts a BIG plus sign in the fixer upper category.
 

timidi
I tend to think, the only good house is an old house.
If it's old, it will probably need some work though. But, you usually know what you're getting. (Good inspections are crucial).
 
 
Take a nail, and hammer it into a 2x4 of a new house. Goes in like buttah..
Do the same in an older house and you'll usually bend the nail before you penetrate the wood much.
 
I just think that newer homes are built really cheaply with cheap garbage components. 
 
Mesh, since your father in law is a contractor, that puts a BIG plus sign in the fixer upper category.
 

Yeah, I basically will be going through him before doing anything......however, her lives in Cali.  and he may only visit during the initial process.

As a former flipper of houses in the upstate NY area, I gotta agree with Mesh and Herb. Be very careful. This kind of venture can easily financially ruin you. First off, if you are trying to get an FHA mortgage, you can forget the fixer upper. They won't touch it. They send their own inspectors and if the paint is peeling, they want the entire house repainted before theyll approve the loan. So you can just imagine what they'll look for inside an older home.
 
My advice would be to find a "dated" home. These are usually owned by older folks who have kept up maintaining the home, but just haven't updated the kitchen, bathrooms, floor coverings. The bones are good, but the skin ain't tight.
These can be good bargains, and you can do the updating as you go and still have a liveable house. There's gotta be hundreds of these in Florida.
 
Investment wise, you'll get most of the money back if you sell the house down the road. On a real fixer upper, where we are talking stripping walls to the bones, wiring, plumbing, hvac, drywall, plus all the new fixtures and floorings, you're not likely to see a return on that money and more likely a loss, depending on how cheap you're able to buy the property for.
 
Also, when it comes to budgeting, take your worse case scenario and add 30%. You'll be lucky if you stay under. Like others have said, when it comes to older homes, if you're using a contractor they have building codes they have to adhere to, and permits to obtain which means inspectors to satisfy. It can turn into a snowball of cash that just keeps growing til it's cheaper to hire an arsonist.
 
I flipped close to 35 houses from 2000 to 2009 when the market fell out. Lots of guys around here thought it looked easy and tried it. HGTV should make a show that has nothing but all the problems that do it yourselfers run into while trying home remodeling projects. That would be fun to watch for me, but I'm a little twisted like that.
 
Randy

Mesh
 
Speaking of "pulling it down and starting again"......we were actually thinking about this as being a good choice. If I'm not mistaken, I think you only need 1 wall standing up to be considered a renovation whereas if everything was flattened down, it would be considered a "new construction" and the taxes are much higher.  

So you're saying that taxes are higher on new builds there ? That's the opposite of how it is here . A friend of mine was going to do exactly that with a place he bought - the front wall was going to be the only bit left standing of the original property. I told him about the tax situation and pulling that one wall down too and calling it a new build saved him around £50k ($84,000). The downsides were that he had to re-submit for planning, which cost him some time and that being a new-build, it then has to comply with new-build regs whereas with a renovation you can bypass some of that......... $84k though................ worth it !

Mesh

jbow
Think it over... talk to some people. Folks watch these shows about house flipping and think that they can do it (I realize that is not what you are talking about but still...) the people on TV have a lot of experience and they still get in over their head sometime but they seem to have accumulated capital to weather the storm of unknowns and bad decisions. Someone with little experience can lose everything quickly in a flip or a remodel. It is the unknowns that cannot be known until you begin.
 
Now about buying an older home to fix up... it is just like it is on some of these shows. The house looks like it needs this or that until... UNTIL you start to fix things and you discover other things, you open a wall and find things that are not compliant with current building code and pretty soon you figure out that there is asbestos insulation on ductwork, or asbestos siding, the wiring is partially three wire and partially two wire (like my wife's office in a 40s house in town, it has asbestos siding too, we leave it alone.) All the outlets look like they are for thre prong plugs but some only have two wires, the ones we didn't add.
 
The older the house the more likely you are to have to change the plumbing, electrical wiring, add supports, worry about insulation (or the lack thereof)... my parents built their house in the 50s and they did not insulate the outer walls and my dad had a short 2x4 put head high or so between every stud in the walls, to easily hang pictures where ever.. in the future. Result, to insulate the walls with blown insulation, it would have to be done twice, once in the top part of the void and once in the lower. The point being, there is a risk in buying a house to fix up, the older the house, the greater the risk because of the nanny state with all their new building codes.
Home inspectors take NO responsibility for what they find or don't find. Being in the Pest Control industry and doing termite control I can tell you with absolute certainty that no builder builds the same way twice. A builder may build 10 houses in a neighborhood and do 10 different odd things on 10 different houses, they may or may not be up to code and there are different codes. There is the international building code and then different towns have different codes, even some neighborhoods have restriction codes (historic districts control everything you can do or not do to a home. Don't buy a home in a "historic district". Check with the local building inspector to see if there are county, city, state, or international building codes that they go by.
 
Usually if you buy a fixer up and just live in it.. no one says anything but the minute you begin to repair it here comes the government.
 
My sister bought an older home in Monticello, FL. Once they got it they found that the whole place needed to be rewired and needs a new roof. They put off rewiring, life happened and now they cannot afford to rewire and for some reason fixing the roof is involved with the rewiring... result: leaky roof, dangerous wiring, too expensive and no company will insure the house unless everything is brought up to current code. It is a nice looking older home that is slowly falling apart. Building is hard and expensive. Electrical should be done by a certified electrician, there are things you can do yourself, but if you make an error the inspector will make you redo everything and in some cases, if your permits aren't in order they will make you tear something down.
 
I'd say if you are young and strong and if you cover ALL your bases by asking the right people the right questions (take NOTHING for granted... people will assume you know things that you may or may not know) ask more than one person about everything you consider doing. Ask people who do renovations about homes that are the age of any home you consider buying, what common problems are for homes built at that time... don't take a "hme inspectors" word for anything, they are just a tool. They regularly tell people that moisture damage is termite damage... JUST BE CAREFUL AND CHECK ALL YOUR BASES TWICE AND ASK LOTS OF QUESTIONS.. THEN ASK IF THERE ARE QUESTIONS THAT YOU DIDN'T ASK.
 
I sound like a bleeding pessimist but I really DO NOT want to hear later that you thought you found the perfect place to fix up but it became a nightmare.
 
All that said... yeah. You can find a place with lots of potential and fix it up to be your dream home, just look before you leap... then look again before you leap.
I'm sure Herb has seen some things too... One thing is sure it will take you more than a hour like it does on TV, it will take more than 30 days like on TV unless you are a pro and know who to call and in what order to call them... that's another thing. If you do some things in the wrong order you may end up having to tear out something you did or had done because no one mentioned that if you want to do that.. you will have to do this first but you already did that and well, you can't do this unless you tear that out...
 
Really, you can do it just don't assume ANYTHING... ever... and ask two different people about everything that you are not sure of.. know your local and state codes and neighborhood rules.
 
J

Thanks Julien for the detailed reply.....I appreciate it.
Yeah, there's a lot to think about.....I'm only looking into this option to see if it's practical and doable. I forgot to mention that my father in-law is a genral contractor and he will be very closely looking into this before we jump in. Like you said, I'll definitely be asking a LOT of questions and not take anything for granted!!

I'm glad you will have the bases covered... (you'd better)!
 
Danny

A couple of replies:
 
I was working full time when we bought the house. Actually I was fired the day before the closing (a Thursday, we closed on Friday) and didn't tell my wife until Monday morning..... she would have freaked. I had a job in a few days and used the week in between to do some preliminary work so we could live in one of the rooms without feeling like we were on a camping trip.
I would come home from working all day and then work on the house until bedtime. there's always a way to get the time, plus, weekends were full of renovation work.
 
Tearing it down..... the town I live in has a 51% rule. You can demo 49% of the structure and be within the guidelines for grandfathered buildings. Beyond that, you have to follow the new and existing code requirements. And that may actually prevent anything from being built back due to setback and side yard requirements now. Some of the lots in this town are tiny and the houses are 24" from the property lines on the sides.
 
Regulations on the work:  If you own it, AND if you're going to live in it as a primary residence, you are permitted to do ALL the work including the licensed trades such as electrical and plumbing and HVAC......BUT, you still must pull the permits and have the work inspected and the work must conform to the active relevant code at the time.

I prefer to wear down my house rather than fix it up. It's just easier.
 
In my experience, contractors are there to do the least work at the lowest cost possible. They make government employees look shockingly productive. The schedule is a bad joke, the costs will be much higher than the estimate, and there is very little chance the work will ever be finished to your satisfaction. They don't care whether or not you can live in the house while they work. They don't care about the impact that their incompetence has on your life. If they show up, they work for an hour and then leave to go to another project they like better. They never have the right tools, the materials, or the correct directions, but they always have their lunch. Lunch usually lasts for at least 2 to 3 hours before they realize they need "a few things" somewhere else and they'll be back "soon". A couple of weeks later, after a dozen angry phone calls, you get them to come back and scratch their heads for an hour while they try to remember where they left off. If you're very, very fortunate, (you're not) they might put your roof on before the winter. There may or may not be walls of some kind. Hopefully, you'll be able to get up the stairs without a ladder. There might be working plumbing, but that's not very likely. You have almost no chance of having electrical power. They'll leave the interior covered with bent nails, broken glass, plasterboard dust, insulation, spilled paint, dry cement, metal shavings of all sizes, small bits of copper wire, and muddy boot prints. The outside looks worse.
 
If they ever finish the job (extremely unlikely), it will bear little similarity to the original plans and you'll probably need to spend the next few years undoing all of the damage or fixing it up yourself. Of course, experiences vary. Yours will probably be very different from mine. Your Father-in-Law is your general contractor, so you're starting off with certain expectations.
 
What is that saying about hiring family members? It always works out well with no hard feelings on either side? No, that's not quite right...