A Tract House Transformation: Lots of Credit Due

We never intended to remodel a house. I did a kitchen once and it was the Job From Hell.

No, we bought this house in 1985, just to make do for a while. Then we would buy a proper place, one with enough room for my teen-age daughters to comfortably visit. I needed a study, and so did my wife, who is a lawyer. We had to have a guest bedroom, one that didn’t double as a television/family room. Perhaps we would need a nursery.

We had 1,170 square feet of three-bedroom, one-bath, 40-year-old tract home on a smallish lot.

My wife, Cammie, had liked its looks from the outside, and she liked it being on a hilltop cul-de-sac. Another plus was the garage-top observation deck with a view of the ocean and Santa Monica Mountains. And we soon came to enjoy our Mar Vista neighborhood and our neighbors.

But we would move. We just had to keep looking. We needed four bedrooms plus a maid’s room. A family room would be a bonus. We told our realtor that if he didn’t find us the right house we were going to add on.

But still hoping to avoid such an ordeal, we told our architect: “It’s a good thing your contract has a cancellation clause, because we have a top-rate realtor working for us and we hope to exercise that clause.”

That was the second architect. The first one had done second-story plans for two of the houses in our cul-de-sac. He worked on a plan-for-fee basis.

For $750 he sketched for us two second-story ideas, one more elaborate than the other, both involving a stairway tucked against the front of the house, parallel to the street. The aim, at our behest, was maximum space for the dollar.

Then we met Barbara Coffman, an architect who was supervising a remodel a few streets away.

Barbara dazzled us with a visit to this house, charmed us with her enthusiasm and convinced us that expansiveness and economy could co-exist. She liked to work a project from beginning to end, she said, but could set a fixed fee based on total estimated project value. We signed on the dotted line, expecting to spend maybe $120,000 on our second story.

Ha! The total would be almost double that.

I had determined that we did not want a stairway “tucked into” the house. Also, the front door could not open into the living room. It had to have its own room, unless it shared a room with the stairway. . . .

And so it went. The kitchen had to have lots of cabinets and counter space. How did people live without pantries?

We met with Barbara weekly and communicated in sketches and scale drawings. She built a cardboard model and revised it regularly. She asked about our interests, hobbies and concerns early on, searching for a motif, a style for our house.

We like lots of light, we said; we like the outdoors, and we have a lot of books.

Eventually, we solicited bids for a plan far beyond our initial limits, but even so we were not at all prepared for what came back. The bids were clustered, all out of reach, way beyond our resources.

We listened to sales pitches for contracts we knew we could not afford.

We had envisioned a dream, drawn pictures of it, made a model. But there was no way we could pay for it. “We’ll get more bids, lots of bids,” Barbara said.

One contractor said the plans were “all wrong” and wanted to redraw the plans to “fit the budget” and “make better use of space.”

There was talk of performance guarantees and bonds, completion insurance, escrow accounts and iron-clad contracts.

Several tradesmen wanted to supervise for a salary, with me acting as owner-contractor. One highly recommended contractor refused to bid. We never knew why.

Then there was a guy who proposed a one-page contract that set forth a payment schedule and said he would build the house according to the plans. His bid was within reach, but the payments seemed bunched up too early. One former client had nothing but praise for him; another had canceled his contract in a dispute.

We interviewed the contractor at length. He had said before bidding that his price would be the lowest. Had he forgotten anything? No. We wanted five-eighth-inch dry wall, as specified. OK. Electrical conduit? Sure. No problem reconstructing the hardwood floors? Nope.

Why did the payments seem weighted toward the early construction phases? That’s the way he always does it. Is he insured? Does he carry workmen’s compensation? Oh, yes. You have to.

What would happen, we wondered, if this one-man construction company named Richard George fell ill or was injured? We put thoughts like that out of our mind and signed him up.

We moved into an apartment near the house, keeping it as our mailing address and leaving a phone line installed for Richard.

Although some people had advised us to stay away from the job site--don’t meddle and avoid the aggravation--we never once regretted staying in close touch. Morning visits with Richard and his subcontractors became a ritual. It seemed that every day there was a question to be answered or a problem to be solved.

“Does Barbara really want that window up at 90 inches?” Richard would ask. Sometimes I knew the answer, other times I had to check with Barbara. Sometimes Richard would call her and she would check with me.

We shopped for Richard. We ordered bathtubs, sinks, countertops, cabinets--$30,000 worth of kitchen and bathroom supplies. One day I bought $700 worth of door knobs at a discount warehouse.

We selected tile and marble where the installers did business and shopped for wallpaper and light fixtures all over town. Our counselors were our craftsmen: a carpenter, a painter, the marble man, the tile man, the electrician and Richard himself.

Richard’s contract included telephone outlets but not doubled television cabling or an alarm system. I found a contractor who did all three and figured out a fair way to charge Richard for his share. I had phone and television jacks put everywhere, as I had done with electrical outlets.

Cammie thought I was crazy. But now you can plug in a phone or a television anywhere. You can have a cable decoder for every television or use a central decoder; a very good buy at $21 a box, even Cammie now agrees.

A friend talked me into stringing speaker wire while the walls were still open. Now we have six pairs of speakers on three sound systems. But there is no speaker wire under carpets or behind chairs, just as there is not a single extension cord in the house.

Sometimes I think that if we had thought of everything and correctly analyzed the costs, we would not have attempted the remodel. For example, we deferred thoughts of “floor coverings,” but these ended up a major expense.

While Richard refinished the lower hardwood floor and put tile in the bathrooms and kitchen, his contract did not cover the $7,000 oak stairway (installed over the rough stairway) or the $3,000 marble entry, let alone carpeting and wood parquet on the second floor.

And we should have known that working on a house almost always is hard on the surrounding flora. Re-landscaping cost around $5,000.

We were mindful all along that we would have to pay extra for kitchen appliances, but we didn’t realize how irresistible the higher priced items would be. Who would put a cheap oven in that wonderful new kitchen? Pay $2,400 and get something nice.

Richard isn’t quite finished. There’s just a bit of painting to go and one or two little things to figure out--like what to put between the carpet and the exposed stove pipe that runs through the loft. But we’re in and we like it.

The place is light and airy and we see a lot of the outdoors. The stairway holds hundreds of books, and the view is a lot better than from atop the garage.

If this had been a major motion picture instead of a house, the credits would be extensive.