Her decision: Sink or swim?

THE house was a hard sell. Real estate agent Lynda Taylor showed it to client after client, none of whom would touch it. It was a prettified shack, they said, an ancient 1,100-square-foot house on a 37-by-90-foot lot in Venice, with an asking price of $1 million. Yes, she told them, but it would be so quick and easy to remodel. Still, it stayed unsold.

The more she showed it, however, the more Taylor wanted it for herself. She stayed up nights imagining life in that vibrant neighborhood, on that idyllic spot facing a canal where ducks and occasional rowboats glide by.

So Taylor decided to go for broke. She sold her elegant house in Pacific Palisades, where she felt “buried”-- and used the profits to buy the smaller, shabbier place.

Her son thought she’d gone nuts. “The place was a dump,” he says. But Taylor, 61, mother of four and a new grandmother, had energy and aspirations. She wanted to reinvent her life, and she had a plan.

“I’d live there a year and hoard my money until I started the remodel,” she says. She knew exactly how to do it because she’d remodeled six houses before. That was years ago and purely for profit. This house would be for her -- the upbeat layout she’d longed for and the existence to match. Her children were grown, her husband was gone, she earned decent money.

“And what the heck, we all have a limited time before we die.... “

If not now, when?

Only Taylor never imagined that going for broke could end up a reality. The remodel, for which she’d put aside $250,000 and which she figured might hit $400,000 tops, would end up costing more than $800,000.

In the process she would run out of money, borrow on the equity in her son’s house, from the husband with whom she no longer lives and from all those credit card companies whose low-interest loan offers came in the mail. “You know those annoying offers most people shred and toss out? I accepted every one of them. I had to. One of my biggest terrors ... was that no more offers would come.”

HER plan seemed so workable. She would cut costs to bare minimum by doing what she’d done before. She’d hire an architect but only to do basic plans. She’d act as her own contractor to save another bundle of cash. She would apply for all permits herself and line up subcontractors while waiting to get started. It seemed foolproof until Taylor actually moved in and realized it might have been foolish.

Her first surprise was the house itself. It wasn’t what she thought it was.

“I figured I could work with what was there, just blow out a couple of walls.”

No way. What was there turned out to be useless. Practically everything had to be demolished and replaced. “The foundation was nothing more than piled up bricks,” which the inspection hadn’t showed. A new foundation was needed.

Then there were the permits: complicated, time-consuming and costly because of the uniqueness of the canal area. The Venice division of the L.A. Department of Building and Safety had all sorts of special requirements she hadn’t heard of. She also needed approval from the California Coastal Commission and had to work her way back through several departments of building and safety.

To top it off, Taylor was required to send copies of her plans to neighbors, who were then allowed time to protest them. Fortunately none did.

Although she sensed costs were starting to skyrocket, Taylor was blase about it, assuming she’d earn enough from sales commissions to cover the added expense.

She selected a young, untested architect, Emily Kovner, who at 33 had never designed a house for a client. It was a leap into uncharted territory, but Taylor’s gut instinct told her Kovner was as good as the others she’d interviewed.

Taylor asked for one big ground floor space, something like a loft, which would blend together the living, dining and kitchen areas, with a front wall of glass that opens completely -- no sliding doors. She wanted a downstairs powder room, three bedrooms and two baths upstairs. The design was up to Kovner, except for Taylor’s stipulation that “we use the least expensive materials possible, and in the most beautiful way.”

Cost for the basic plan was about $14,000. By the time the house was completed, Kovner’s fees had ballooned to nearly $44,000, Taylor says.

Surprises kept coming and costs kept rising. Taylor planned to keep 50% of the walls already there. “But when we got to construction, we discovered those walls were totally infested. The walls I was supposed to keep were ones I had to replace.”

MORE permits were needed to remove the walls and rebuild them exactly in the same place.

She hired one general contractor, Dan Howard of Santa Monica, to do just the demolition, foundation and framing but not to oversee the whole job. His fee for that would have broken her bank, she says. She didn’t even let him order the lumber because she knew he would add a middleman cost.

Instead, she mailed the architect’s plans to a Santa Cruz firm that does what’s called a “take-off list” -- an itemization of the exact lumber needed for the project. She sent the list off to five different lumber yards, compared bids and picked the lowest.

Howard didn’t mind. He liked Taylor’s optimism and humor. “It was infectious. In spite of the problems, you could tell she was having a great time.”

Yes, but inside, Taylor was starting to panic.

To find the subcontractors she’d need -- to do electrical, plumbing, drywall and other specialties -- she’d spent days driving to construction sites in the neighborhood, collecting names of firms and getting their bids. It soon became clear she was off her financial course. Worse yet, nature and global economics unexpectedly intervened.

“I budgeted this out completely inadequately. I started construction in 2004, when Florida had all those hurricanes, and because of that the price of plywood tripled. Tripled. This house is filled with plywood.”

The price of steel also tripled because of rebuilding in Iraq and increased demand from China. “There’s lots of steel in this house, and the garage, which has an artist studio above it, is also steel.”

Then came last year’s torrential rains, which stopped work for weeks and turned her partly built house into a sieve. Water drenched the wall insulation, which had just been installed. And it proved that the waterproofer she’d just paid had done a totally incompetent job. She had to hire someone else to do it over -- at a cost of about $30,000.There were times during all the setbacks and crises that Taylor wanted to abandon the house completely. She had even considered selling it unfinished. But by then she was in too deep to get out; she could never recoup her investment.

She used to drive a Mercedes Benz, and was now tooling around in a Nissan truck. She bought it to haul cement, lumber and other heavy materials and equipment for workers and for jobs she did herself.

“During this whole process, I frequently picked up workers on the street to help me. I certainly couldn’t lift 90-pound cement bags all alone.”

With some of these workers, she rented a cement mixer and built the front patio with “my own two hands.” And with them she climbed on the roof during the rains to cover the partly built house with heavy rubberized fabric bought in frantic haste when she realized the waterproofing was defective.

When the cedar siding was installed on the exterior, Taylor wanted it stained, not painted. She hired a man who claimed he knew how to do it and then left town for a few days. Taylor returned to find the house painted, not stained.

So she hired day laborers again, rented a disc-sanding machine, and together they sanded off all the paint. Then they formed a sort of assembly line. “I climbed up on scaffolding and applied paint, and I had the guys right behind me, rubbing most of it off.” In this way, they achieved the pale wash of gray that she wanted.

Then there was the cabinetmaker who disappeared after she paid him $11,000 to do a job he never completed. She hired another.

Unexpected complications with installation of the metal roof, with plumbing and electrical and with seven different types of custom-made steel-framed windows and doors kept her up nights worrying even more about money.

By now, she’d used up all her savings, as well as the home equity loan she’d taken on the house and had begun to borrow from family and mail offer loans.

NIGHTTIME was the worst. Taylor says she called her husband frequently, feeling desperate. “I’d keep asking him to remind me why I got myself into this. Why am I going broke building what was supposed to be my dream house?”

David Charles Taylor says he tried to ease his wife’s fears, telling her it was good she had a vision for her life and that she was trying to realize it. He says he never doubted she’d succeed and repay the $90,000 he lent her after she’d already borrowed on the equity of their son’s house.

(He lives in Santa Barbara, where he’s earning a doctorate in clinical psychology. The couple see each other some weekends, but have decided to live separate lives, he says.) Daytimes weren’t much better. For months Taylor called her architect every day, multiple times a day -- always in agitation, indecision or frustration. “It got to where she had to treat me as if she was a doctor with a very sick patient,” Taylor says.

Certain troubling realities had become very clear. Her past experience with remodeling was useless in many ways. Those previous houses hadn’t been anywhere near as inventive and modern as the architect’s design.

Taylor was used to working with traditional shingle or tile roofs, for example. This roof was metal, prepared and installed in a way she’d never seen. She was also familiar with regular wood-frame windows and doors, which can be trimmed to fit in case of error. This house had custom-size, steel-framed windows and doors, with no margin for mistakes in fit.

She had no idea how to cut costs in these areas, which were so intrinsic to Kovner’s design. In fact, there was no way to cut many of the costs because the items weren’t easily available and couldn’t be bargained for. And the whole design of the house, which Taylor adored, depended upon them.

The front wall of folding glass, for example, is made by a firm in Germany, and can only be installed by representatives of that particular manufacturer.

The custom windows and doors came from seven different specialists.

The interior touch that Kovner designed as the signature of the house, the piece de resistance of the project, was a controversial brick wall that runs through the house, front to back.

Here again, Taylor suddenly felt out of her element. She’d asked for a loft-like feeling but never imagined red brick. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea, then hated the idea, then detested the color of the brick, then worried about what she calls “the strange efflorescence,” a glitter in the mortar, to name a few complaints she phoned the architect about on a daily basis.

The idea that after all this trauma, the main room of her house would have a highly visible wall that she found ugly was too much to bear.

One other thing about that brick wall: It was designed to contain all electrical and plumbing for the house. But after trying mightily, the electricians and plumbers couldn’t fit all the equipment into the narrow space.

Their time was costing money, and the clock kept ticking as Kovner was asked to do more and more detailed plans. Taylor’s simmer rose to a boil. The architect remained calm and confident throughout it all, Taylor says.

The irony of it all is that the brick wall is now one of the things Taylor likes best about the house, she says with a laugh. It adds warmth and spirit, and she can’t imagine the house without it.

EVEN with all the delays and missteps, the house was completely finished in 10 months. Taylor, who’d lived with her parents and in a tiny furnished apartment during the remodel, was able to move back there early in 2005.

Does this house reflect who she is as a person? Has living in it altered her life in any significant way?

She looks stricken, then bursts into tears. “Oh yes. It’s not just living in it that moves me, but the fact that I actually managed to get it built and did it by myself. I feel so much more confident.”

And debts, believe it or not, are no longer a problem. She refinanced the house as soon as she got her certificate of occupancy. With that money she immediately repaid every debt she owed, she says.

Taylor’s new house is simple, even soothing to the eye: a sturdy cube made oddly buoyant by walls and doors of glass and a metal roof that tilts up, like a butterfly’s wings.

“A house can be a metaphor for a life, you know. And in my case it is,” she says.

For decades she’d lived with her husband and children in a big beautiful house that she says never felt good to her.

“So much space was wasted, completely unused. The house was laid out, as so many are, to isolate a person according to their chores. It’s so frustrating to be utterly cut off from everyone else because you’re in the kitchen, cooking. I just always wanted to bust through those walls and create one big space. So that everybody is included in the same activities. So that everyone is part of everything.”

That’s exactly what she now has. On Easter, for example, she fed the entire family without ever missing a conversational beat -- and with kids and dogs roaming freely in and out in full view of everyone.

Now able to put her full energies back into selling real estate, she has not only upped her income, but her financial assets as well.

The house was appraised at $2.2 million upon completion. It is now worth about $3 million if she were to sell it, she says.

“But I can’t. I’ve put too much of myself into it for that.”

Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

DIY, but carefully

Although Lynda Taylor ended up spending twice the $400,000 maximum she had budgeted for her remodel, the Venice resident estimates she still saved about $300,000 by acting as her own contractor. But be forewarned: Lining up subcontractors is tricky. Taylor had previously completed six remodels and still she got stuck with a few flakes, fakers and frauds.

Highlights of what Taylor learned from her remodel:

Architect: If you care about good design, she says hiring an architect is worth more than the added cost. The American Institute of Architects offers a 20-page primer, “You and Your Architect,” at www.aia.org.

Overseeing your own remodel: Be prepared to apply for permits, hire subcontractors for specific jobs and solve unexpected problems. “What You Should Know Before You Hire a Contractor” provides an overview of what a contractor does. It is available from the Contractors State License Board at www.cslb.ca.gov.

Budgeting: You need to be a psychic to foresee weather, wars, worker mistakes and equipment malfunctions that could send construction costs soaring. Plan to spend more than your highest estimates -- and have fallback funds. The above two websites have tips on budget considerations as does www.ownerbuilder.com/HomeBudget.shtml.

Subcontractors: Finding good subcontractors takes time, work and patience. Also, you have the right to make a down payment of no more than 10 % of the project price or $1,000, whichever is less. For more information, go to www.cslb.ca.gov.

-- Bettijane Levine