How to Avoid "The Money Pit"
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  If you are considering remodeling to make your existing home meet your     current lifestyle or to simply update it, do yourself a favor and go rent the film "The Money Pit" starring Tom Hanks and Shelly Long. Every scene in this  hilarious movie has a basis in fact. Extensive remodeling and addition is not a matter ro be taken lightly.

  We are not talking about repainting the kitchen here to spruce up the house or make it more presentable for sale - we are talking about major remodeling and/or additions.

   The following are just a few of the pitfalls that you can encounter:

  * You may over-build your neighborhood market. Said in other terms, you may put so much into remodeling your home to enhance it's beauty, you end up with a nicer home than anything on your street. You then may not be able to sell it for a price that will recapture your investment.

  * You will almost always end up spending more than you planned. When you open up the walls of an existing home and start to add on or remodel, you almost always find ugly little surprises such as walls that are out of square, electrical systems that will not support the new plans, no way to get heat and air to the new addition, existing home components that do not meet code in conjunction with the new addition, and last but certainly not least, the presence of termites or dry rot.

  * The end result may not fit well with the existing home, thus looking like an ugly afterthought.

  * Once you begin the addition plan, you will live in constant chaos until the job is completed.


   So how do you avoid this nightmare?

  * Plan carefully and be prepared to spend a little money up front to determine if the project really makes sense from a physical as well as a financial point of view.

  * get someone who knows what they are doing to find out if the existing structure is square and level and generally sound.

  * Make sure that you know where the property lines and setbacks are before you start. Get a survey done to ensure this information is correct.

  * Find someone who can draw the basic structure of the existing home on a CAD program. Then have the proposed addition or remodel added to this drawing in 3D to see if the plan will work.

  * Find a realtor who will perform a competitive market analysis on your neighborhood. If homes in your neighborhood are selling for $80.00 per heated square foot, and it is going cost you $100.00 per heated square foot to remodel or add-on, it is not cost effective to take on the project.

  * Find a good General Contractor to do the job for you. see "choosing a General Contractor" While it is true many people have done well with remodeling or additions to their home, it is also true that some have ended up in insane asylums and/or divorced because they dove into a project without understanding all that was involved.

    If you haven't guessed, AMEREICORP, INC. can handle all these items for you.