Are you doing it yourself, and if so, are you good? if you are contracting it out, how good are your contractors?

Basically, lotsa "if's"

Figure on 4-6 months. The actual time will be determined by the kitchen(3 months) and the screened porch(one month), as well as how many different jobs can be done simultaneously.

We were watching the "Modern Marvels" show on the History Channel and they said the "Empire State Building" in New York City was completed from ground breaking to finish in one year.

Habitat for Humanity currently holds the worlds record for building a house in 3.5 hours.

My sister began remodeling her bathroom in 1986 and it still is not done...

Which goes to show that every job is different and there are far too many variables to even attempt to give you a time frame.

We will be contracting most of it out. We don't have the skills or time to do most of the renovation. We want the outcome to be of quality. The renovation will be done "all at once", since we will be using a HELOC and don't currently live there. This helps because they won't have to work around us living there, etc.

We would like to try to do a few things ourselves. My partner is pretty handy, and his Dad is a retired electrician. So all the re-wiring is good to go for free. And we would be able to do any new moulding we wanted. If it comes down to it, we can also build our own deck if we need. Most of the other stuff I'd like to leave to the pros, especially the kitchen. We don't have the skill to lay tile and make sure the cabinets are level to the mini-millimeters.

The screened porch will go directly off the back of the house where the kitchen is and will require a totally new roof from the peak on down...the pitch needs to be appropriate for any heavy snow/rain. My two "needs" for moving back to that house, other than general renovations, was to open up the kitchen and add a screened porch because the mosquitos there are terrible!

We are purposely avoiding add-ons to reduce our cost, but I sure would like to bump out the kitchen 4' to line it up with the rest of the back of the house! Boy that would be nice! In the picture, the kitchen is the part with the big window that is about 4' shallower than the bump out to the right. We suspect this will add a large amount of cost, though, so we are avoiding it. Won't know til we meet with the contractors.

We will meet with contractors soon I just wanted to see if some of you experienced people had a general idea of typical time frames. I have no idea what to expect since we are new to total renovations. I am sure I will be back for advice, etc. during the renovations.

Stanly