Reply to How much work/stress is a major home renovation?

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[quote=Anonymous]DH and I are considering a major home renovation to accommodate our growing family. But we are not sure we have the bandwidth to take on this project in addition to our jobs and kids.

Basics: Two FT working parents and two young kids in a 3 bedroom, 1500 sq foot home. No separate office (one of us works from home) or guestroom (we have semi-regular visitors, will probably be more regular as parents age), but our finished basement has served ok for both purposes.

We don’t have an urgent pressing need for more space, but it has been feeling real tight ever since kid #2 arrived and feels like we could really benefit from more space as the kids get older, want more privacy, room to hang with friends, and if we both end up working from home. We are considering a major addition to add a guestroom/office, a family room, and a mudroom (we have no real entryway), and have already vetted an architect to work with. We have the budget to do it. We’d move out for construction (which we're told could take anywhere from 8-10 months, aka probably a year??).

But…we are now getting cold feet, mostly because the idea of taking on *anything* major and stressful on top of our jobs and the kids seems like guaranteed misery. And we’ve heard all the horror stories from friends and neighbors about horrendous contractors, projects running majorly over budget and over time, etc etc etc.

Then again, we know it will never be a “good time” to take this on, and maybe we should just rip off the bandaid while the kids are still young.

1) What are the most time-consuming and stressful parts of dealing with a major renovation, from a homeowner's perspective? Should we basically be thinking of it as a part-time job/gig that will need constant attention and time, alongside the rest of our lives? Should we expect to sacrifice major work/family time?

2) Should we renovate now? Wait until the kids are older, and we are busting out the seams/truly desperate to do it? Or make do with the space we have (declutter, reorganize, etc), knowing that Americans are overly obsessed with having huge homes?[/quote]

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