Number one is going to be the foundation. We have a lot of foundation issues here in San Antonio, and the cost to fix them can be quite a bit. It depends on a lot of factors. Is it a pier and beam home? Is it a slab foundation home? How big is the house? How many piers? What’s the degree of damage that you need to fix? If you’re just going to guess on a number, and I would get several bids if you don’t have a lot of experience in this area, but on a pier and beam house, it’s going to be several thousand dollars. Factor in four or $5,000, maybe more if you can tell that the house is way off. On a slab foundation home, you’d better start with $10,000 as your rehab estimate for your project, and then go from there. But get multiple bids, because I’ve seen foundation bids come back 30, $40,000, and you don’t want to get a surprise like that if you’re planning out a rehab project.
Number two, major plumbing. This is not like a small leak or a small leak in a pipe or changing out the faucet. Most of these major plumbing repairs and the big expenses are going to be in the sewer line, so the water going out of the house. Where we see that happen a lot is in combination, whereas the property is moved, and now you have cracks in the sewer lines. Some of those you can go in and fix, but on a slab foundation you have to dig to get to those sewer lines. So you dig in, and that is very expensive. Now, if you have a much older home where they still have some cast iron and things in there, sometimes you can’t just repair that in one piece. Sometimes you have to replace all of the sewer lines. All of the sewer lines is very expensive. If you know you’re going to have major plumbing issues, start with several thousand dollars. If you know you have much older plumbing and are going to have to replace all of those lines, you need to factor in probably $10,000 to replace those sewer lines under a slab foundation.
Number three, roofs. Roof repairs can be a little tough to judge because it’s going to depend on how old it is, how big it is, how much your pitch is, and what type of roof you want to put on there. On the smaller homes, most of the time you can factor in about $5,000 for your roof, and then it’s your house gets bigger, obviously, that number’s going to go up, or if you’re using a product like a metal roof or things like that. Other things that you want to look out for is under the roof, it’s a really old roof, and say, you’re inside and you can see where it’s leaking through there. It’s probably been leaking a while, which is going to affect the decking. That’s the wood that the shingles or whatever goes on top is going to go on top of. If you have to replace the decking and replace the shingles in the roof, that’s going to be an additional several thousand dollars to do that, so if you see where you know that this roof has been leaking for years and years and years, you’ve got to factor some of that into your cost.
HVAC. It’s another big one. Heating, AC. If you’re going to have to replace that unit, start with several thousand dollars. But also where people I think on the rehab side miss a lot is they say, “Oh, well the last one I did, it cost me $5,000 to replace this unit.” Great. Well now we’re putting in a new unit in a house that’s never had HVAC in it before, so it doesn’t have the ducts. So now you’ve got to start with your units, but you’ve also got to put in the ductwork, and you also need to look at your electrical, because those electrical panels probably weren’t set up to carry that much load, and so then you start getting additional costs that you didn’t factor in there. Ductwork, you got to lay a slab to put the exterior unit on, you have a place to put the inside unit and have your electrician or your AC guy might be able to tell you if you’re going to need to upgrade the electrical in order to put in that unit.
And that takes us to the major electrical. When you have to rewire a house, it’s very expensive. Fixing a few minor things in the electrical system, it’s not always that big of a deal. You hire the electric and he comes in, he does what he does, and he makes everything great. When you have to go in and rewire the entire house, you’re into the thousands of dollars. Most of the time you’ll end up with like an eight, $9,000 bill.
There are other things that we see here. You know, mold can be very expensive. If you have to replace all the siding, depending on how big your house is and what all you have to do, that can be really expensive. The flooring is going to be several thousand dollars. But where I see people miss the most are these right here. And oftentimes a lot of them go together. You move the foundation and you crack this plumbing. So you may have accounted for this, but did you account for this one? Oh, I’m going to put in this new HVAC system, but did I factor in that I’m going to need to upgrade my electrical, and then what am I going to need to do?
If you don’t have the experience, don’t rush it. Take your time. Get somebody with the experience that can help you, or get multiple bids on these, because you’ll see, one, some of your bids are going to be way different than others from different contractors, and two, you’re going to learn sometimes, “Man, I really thought it was going to be 10,000. I didn’t realize I needed that many piers. It’s actually 25,000.” If you’re new, take your time, start, because you don’t want to get partway through the project and you’ve only fixed some of this stuff, but now you’re already $15,000 over your total budget.
I hope this helps. If we can help you with anything, you can find us on the website sellmysanantoniohouse.com, or give us a shout, (210) 201-6644.