Reply to Anyone buy a fixer and live there with little kids?

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[quote=Anonymous]We bought an old fixer-upper about 6 years ago (definitely not a 1990s house), so these figures are not very recent.  We managed it because we were able to stay in our old place for a couple of months after we bought the house.  We hired a general contractor who assured us he could do the most necessary (nothing fancy) updates in those two months.  We didn't have to live through any of the interior work; we only moved in after the house was done and all cleaned up.  Our experience with an old house is probably not very applicable to your situation, but FWIW, we spent about $25,000 to replace all windows, refinish all the hardwood floors (I've no experience re what new hardwoods would cost), replace the floor in the kitchen and sunroom, update the two bathrooms with midrange Home Depot stuff, and repaint the interior (with replastering/fixing of walls where necessary).  Eventually, after we had moved in, we spent about $3,000 for yard clean-up, landscaping, and putting in a stone patio (but we have a small city yard).  We also gradually cleaned up the finished part of the basement by putting in some new, but utilitarian carpet (for about $300 for one room plus stairs) and painting the outdated wood paneling ourselves.  Unless you have a very big yard or want a lot of new landscaping, hiring someone to clean the yard would be a lot less than $5-10,000, I would think.  In our case, the bulk of the cost for the yard makeover went to the stones for the patio and gravel/stones for a "rock garden" type corner.[/quote]

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