My husband and I decided to buy a fixer upper and renovate it. We have been looking in a particular neighbourhood for many years. A house came to the market that needed the works. There was no operational heating system, the plumbing was shot and the electricity was no good. It was on the higher end of our budget but we decided to go all in. In hindsight, I don’t know what we were thinking. We didn’t buy a house that just needed new paint, we needed to rip walls down and replace systems. At the same time we realized that I was expecting and that we had a lot on our plate. We both worked full time jobs and had a 1 year old. We began interviewing general contractors and realized that they were asking for astronomical amounts of money. We decided that we didn’t need their services and began upgrades ourselves. Well, we had many issues.

The first thing to go in the house was all the plaster and blown in insulation. We rented a dumpster and hired someday labourers. The dumpster cost us three hundred dollars and it was full within one day. We thought at this rate that we would be done in 4 months. We called the dumpster people to pick up the trailer. They did and also told us that we were one thousand pound over weight and we needed to pay an additional seven hundred dollars. So, after ten dumpster we had successfully gutted our entire house. Next to go was plumbing. We hired a plumber, we read up on this one so we knew what to expect. We shouldn’t pay him until inspections by the city are done. So the city inspector came to inspect the plumbing and told us we passed. We paid our plumber in full.

Then several months later we were ready for building inspection and we failed due to plumbing. The plumber cut out too much into the beams and now we needed to sister beams and redo the plumbing. We had to pay another plumber to come and fix the mess; we were down another thousand for this mistake. Our renovation took twelve months and we still weren’t done. There is still a lot of work left to do and we are out of capital.