A Few More Repairs

Yesterday, I decided to make a few more repairs: replacing the two toilets and putting down new linoleum in the bathrooms and a few other places in the house. The toilets are dirty and have black stains at the bottom of the bowl that I doubt even serious scrubbing will remove. And while they technically work, they work in more of a "barely working" type of fashion. My home inspector did not mention them in his report, but I figure another inspector might. I previously talked about the drip in the master bathroom and, while there was no damage in that room, some water must have seeped under the wall to the other bathroom (they are back-to-back) and caused two of the tiles in there to curl up.

My concern is that the new bathroom vanities with the new sinks will really cause the old toilets to stick out. I figure there's a 50-50 chance an inspector would flag the toilets and / or there is a good possibility a buyer would ask me to replace them anyway. And since the toilets are coming out, I might as well take the opportunity to replace the outdated linoleum. In addition to the bathrooms, there is linoleum in a couple closets and in a small area at the entryway. The linoleum pattern in those places is quite dated too. I think it would be better to present a new look to potential buyers throughout the entire house rather than have it look like the rehabber ran out of money or replaced stuff haphazardly. That could translate to a higher selling price.

I considered just offering a couple hundred dollars to the buyer for a flooring and toilet allowance, but I tried the allowance route on the last house I sold. The buyer didn't accept it and I had to fix the stuff anyway. I'd rather get the items replaced now while there is no close of escrow deadline looming over me.

Total cost for these repairs shouldn't be too high. Toilets run about $65 each. Altogether, I figure there is less than 75 square feet of linoleum that needs to be replaced, so that won't be too much. My biggest concern is that the repairs will mean more delays before I can get the house listed. But the cabinet guy is still there working on connecting plumbing today and I am going to be out of town tomorrow through Monday, so nothing really will be happening until next week anyway.

I called my handyman and asked how soon he could get all this stuff done. He said he could start Monday and would be finished by Wednesday. Perfect! I was thinking about offering him an extra $100 if he could be done by Wednesday, but now I don't have to! So I'm looking at maybe an extra 1 or 2 day delay in listing the property.

Although the delay isn't that great, I am still kicking myself. When I look back over this whole project, I can see I've really done stuff serially instead of in parallel, which has cost me at least a couple weeks. This was mainly because I did not have a firm picture of everything I wanted done. The cabinets were something of an afterthought. I should have had made up my mind to replace them and had them ordered even before my handyman started working. The bathrooms and linoleum were items I was on the fence about replacing. I thought they should be replaced, but I got worried about the amount of money I was putting into the place. (The $2,000 aluminum wiring correction was an unexpected expense.) Those items should have been on my handyman's initial fix list. This is a perfect example of one of my favorite phrases: "Oh man! Not another learning experience!"