If you won an absurd contest which awarded you with a million dollars in home renovations, could you actually find enough stuff to spend the money on-- while at the same time keeping your house relatively consistent (on the outside) with the rest of the houses on your block (i.e. no marble pillars and gold-plated gargoyles if the rest of your block is 3-bedroom bungalows on postage-stamp lots).
What are some cool things you’d do to eat up the money?
Trading Spaces had a special with an absurd budget. 100 grand? or maybe 200 grand? I recall Doug was one of the designers.
He ended up buying some over the top stuff trying to use all the budget. There’s only so much you can do in a weekend decorating show.
I seem to recall one designer buying this ridiculous fabric. Several hundred bucks a yard to make a slip cover and drapes.
A million dollars in renovations, hmm. I know what would take a big chunk out of it for us.
Our house is very mod, with the roof slanting all one direction, from about 14’ at the back to 10’ at the front. We have a large and flat back yard. I’d put an addition on the back, with the roof slanting the other way. The slider doors in the back of our great room would become french doors into our new master suite, with walk-in closet and high-end finishes in the very large bathroom. And we’d get a king size bed.
Then we could upgrade the finishes in the bathrooms and kitchen. We gutted the house three years ago, but put back commercial vinyl tile floors, IKEA cabinets, and Staron counters due to budget issues. I’d put in more expensive stuff, if we had the money. New appliances can of course go into the budget, as can the new furniture for the new master.
Then the HVAC needs a comprehensive overhaul. A complete new system of ducts would dramatically increase the house’s energy efficiency. In fact, I’d like to move the furnace and water heater out to the oversized garage, so the laundry closet and the utility closet, which back onto each other, could be opened up into one proper laundry room with a door that closes.
My husband would want to insulate and drywall the garage, which he uses as his workshop. Then he could work in there in the winter. Built-in workbench and shelves too.
Finally, we’d like a conservatory built onto the concrete slab behind the garage.
Think we’d be there yet? Hmmm. Maybe not.
I would have a second story edition put on my house. That would take about 250 grand. A pool in the backyard.
It would be hard spending the whole million.
I would have one hell of a kitchen. Or kitchen(s). I could easily make a case for needing a standard kitchen, a molecular gastronomy kitchen (with a LOT of money tied up in things like commercial grade emulsifiers and such), a brewing kitchen, and a curing kitchen.
Hell, $1 Million might not be enough…
My flat, plus the garage-with-kitchen on the ground floor of the same building, cost less than 200K. I think not even my mother, and not even with a lot of work setting up the ground-floor room to be one bathroom short of a studio, would be able to drop 1M into the place. Or maybe I could tear up the kitchen, set up the electricity and water independently (right now they’re both coming from the building’s common area, as are those of every other storage room, garage or garage-kitchen) and turn half of the walled-off kitchen into a bathroom, setting up the rest as a workroom. Still would take some serious dunking to spend 1M… guess I could start by getting a WW-series toilet (those things are 5K at company-worker prices).
Maybe if I was able to buy one of the neighboring flats and turn them into a duplex, but that would involve holes in the bathrooms so it doesn’t sound like a good option.
Now that I really think about it, if I had a million dollars I’d just bulldoze the house and start from scratch. I’m sure it would be easy to design a million-dollar house. Five bed, five and a half bath, chef’s kitchen, two or three common living areas, large conservatory, pool in the back yard, and a nice workshop for my husband with a SEPARATE garage.
Buy some property and build…
I guess i’d need to buy a house first!
Man, that’d be tough. I have a 1920 a-frame with 1800 sq. ft. in the floorplan. I imagine completely gutting it and building out would cost about $150k. Add in premium materials (high-end fixtures, resoration-level hardwood floors, window upgrades, fully modern kitchen/baths, etc.), that’s maybe an extra $200k if you go nuts. What’s a geothermal power installation run for a residential house cost? $50k? Let’s go with $100k just in case.
I bet I could design a $100k detached garage upgrade as well (assuming I can get the design past the historical district approval board).
I guess I could have the basement completely dug out - it’s currently just half a cellar and a crawl space. That can’t be cheap. There’d likely be some extremely expensive footings and such to dig and install. And of course I’d then have a full basement to finish and furnish - but I can’t imagine that entire project costing more than $200k, leaving me $250k. Super high-end home theater, maybe? Fine art? Dunno - maybe I’d have to mail in my property tax appraisal using an old stamp.
Sometimes it feels like I need $1mm to get this house up to where I’d consider it “awesome.”
I’d make the basement bigger - it needs to be deeper if I want to finish it properly with a drop ceiling. Also bump it out the back, add a full bathroom, probably an actual laundry “room” and maybe another guest room. Or maybe even some sort of suite I could rent out.
On top of the new bumped-out basement would be my bigger master suite with luxury bath, bigger kitchen and somehow bigger living room. A nice deck and patio to tie it all together.
The back yard would have an in-ground pool, hot tub, some nice landscaping. New driveway in the front, new sidewalk, new landscaping. Re-sod the front and back lawns so they’re no longer bumpy - make them smooth as a runway with high quality grass.
Oh yeah and insulate the whole place to the hilt! The best windows money can buy, too. New roof just for funsies and of course new vinyl siding.
Probably upgrade the plumbing and hvac.
With the money left over, paint and furniture.
I have a little bit of background since we’re just finalizing the renovation plans for our house.
[ul]
[li]We’re adding an enormous family room (20’x24’) with a fieldstone chimney[/li][li]a full basement below the family room with a new furnace[/li][li]completely removing the second floor from 1/2 of the house and rebuilding it[/li][li] adding a second floor bathroom[/li][li]converting a first floor bathroom to a pantry [/li][li]adding a 10’x10’ mudroom and a 2.5 car garage[/li][li]replacing nearly all of the windows with top-of-the line energy efficient models[/li][li]residing the entire structure with 30 - year warranty engineered wooden siding[/li][li]re-roofing the entire structure with standing-seam metal roofing[/li][/ul]
And all of that won’t even cost us $200K!
A million dollars would be difficult to spend without really standing out on the block. Can I use the leftover $800K to buy more of the land around me?
In my town, I could build a second, swanky house for probably $300K from the ground up. I reckon I could trade up to an absurdly-swanky house for $600K or so. Looking at the local listings, I can get a 5,532 square foot house, 4/4.5/3, for $520K.
Sure. One of the things on my list would be to buy the house next to us, demo it, and turn the land into a nicely landscaped garden with a completely pimped-out cabana.
I’ve just bought (ordered?) a new house and some very good friends of ours bought the one next door. We’ve been joking about making a tunnel to connect the two basements to a shared lair under the back yards. I think with a million bucks we could do it and make it awesome.
See now, if that’s allowed, I might be able to spend the whole million.
Oh! That reminds me - not a tunnel, but a bridge. My house is perched at the top of a ravine, and there’s a creek at the bottom. To get over it, you have to go down the steep side of the ravine, cross the creek, then up the even steeper ravine on the other side. Mr. Athena and I often joke that we need something like this put in our backyard. I’m guessing that would take up a great part of the $1 million.
I don’t know what the National Electric code would have to say on the subject, but I could commission someone to make some solid gold power wiring. 100 feet of 14/2 in 18 karat can’t be cheap.
Or just have a new porch railing cast in gold or platinum, then paint it to match the old one. A six foot chunk of railing would cost more than the house it’s attached to.
I live in a Washington rowhouse built in the 1920s. I’ve always had this idle fantasy of restoring it to exactly how it looked the day it was built. I’d spend a chunk of the budget hiring a team of researchers to find old photos and blueprints, and another chunk filling the home with period furniture and fixtures. I don’t know why, I just think it would be cool.
I also want to buy up all the othe rowhouse on my side of the street and convert them into one long house. From the outside it would look like 10 different house, but it would room for a rollerink inside.
Digitize and network everything! Tablet in each room to control any part of the house from heating to lighting. Have my bath ready at ideal temperature when I come home from work! I guess my theoretical home would be too small for most of this to really matter, but meh.
