“Put it this way: you buy an eighteen hundred square foot house in this neighbourhood for around eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You tear it down and rebuild it to a three thousand or thirty-five hundred square foot house at a cost of about six hundred thousand. You take it to the maximum elevation, or the designer makes this big, square looking thing, and by the time you get to landscaping, you’re in it for a million and a half dollars.
It doesn’t make sense to me. These houses have been here for a hundred years. Generations of kids grew up in them and moved on. I think it’s way more affordable to gut them down to the frames and studs, redesign and open up the rooms, maybe put an addition on the back part to extend the kitchen…. after you’re all done and said, you can have a really efficient house for the utilities. With a couple of solar panels in these old little homes, you can live off the power grid. Imagine! You can pull the permits yourself, get a couple of really good electrical and plumbing crews, and you wouldn’t have to spend more than say, forty to fifty thousand.
And imagine this, it’s a lot easier on your neighbours if you have a house that fits with the look and feel of the community instead of one that blocks out their sun once the house hits these crazy high elevations.”