I recently inherited a home in the Southern California area that is in disarray. It needs a new a roof, walls need to be redone/re-framed, floor joists need replacing, etc. How doable is it for me, a 37 year old tech worker to most if not all this work on my own with very little construction experience? I have 12 hours a day i can devote to this task, and money to buy any and all materials/tools needed. Pic related. Not quite this bad but close to it.
Hire an inspector first, get a proper run down on what needs to be done. Start at the foundations, are they sound? Are the ground drains working properly? Do you have asbestos anywhere in the home? Is there mold? Is there dry rot? etc.
Once you've determined this, you'd have to be smart and decide which of these tasks you can actually take on yourself. Framing some interior walls, sure, rebuilding a crumbling foundation, not so much.
I finished my parent's basement at 17 using a code book and stolen lumber, I ran my own plumbing and had an electrician spot check all my runs and actually wire the boxes once I installed them. Drywall I did myself and paid a guy to mud it. That's about the extent someone with zero experience should be able to do.
Seconding this, have a professional come through and make a detailed list of what is fricked and what isn't. Sometimes its just NOT worth trying to renovate a house, these shitboxes can get fricked so badly that its just better to tear it down and put a new structure. Since it's Southern California its almost certain that this is just a wooden shitbox that was slapped together cheaply. The land is the real asset here, I've know many people who got stuck trying to repair a house in bad shape and it became a demoralizing moneypit that left them worse off than when they started the project, often time a half completed failure that they couldn't even sell at a price to cover their debts from renovating it.
If the professional comes up with a ridiculously large number of serious issues just have the house bulldozed and start fresh. Don't limit yourself to wooden framed shitboxes, being Southern California this is the WRONG path to take and you would be better served by making a house out of rammed earth or cob with mission roof tiles like you see in Italy.
Good luck
Sell it. Not worth the effort
Slap some lipstick on the pig and flip it
Rent it out, some twaker don’t care about the problems
The whole foundation looks fricked, tear it down and rebuild or sell
Play some geoguesser you sexhaver. OP's pic is clearly not in cali, rather the midwest or northeast
Assuming the foundation isn't fricked...
You are gonna work basically every single day for 8 or 9 months to fix that place up. And given material costs you are looking at buying about 50k worth of stuff to fix it up.
And once day I'm not sure about the area but that house may fetch $200k to $250k in Southern Cali.
So is that worth it? Prob not
the lot value alone on the home is over 450K as is though anon.
Ok then if that’s the case then the land is the real score and the house isn’t worth the work.
Knock it down, clean up then sell the land
>tech worker
Okay, now imagine a 37 year old construction worker who inherited a Linux cluster asking how doable it is for him to administer an email server.
you're telling me fixing up a home is equivalent to administering a Linux cluster when I see illiterate Mexican day laborers hanging outside of Home Depot capable of fixing a house on the daily? When's the last time you saw an illiterate fresh off the boat Salvadorean offering to administer your Linux cluster anon? Is it never?
>an illiterate fresh off the boat Salvadorean offering to administer your Linux cluster
Change that to Indian and the answer is: all the time.
Those mexican day labourers can only do rough stuff like framing, drywalling and painting. Roofing. And all poorly at that. The electricians, plumbers, HVAC are pretty much all skilled tradesmen, and White.
Who said these beans know what their doing
One tells the rest. Builders don’t give a frick and most homeowners don’t know any different in fact the beans don’t give a frick because they know you have no choice
don't sell the land, the gov don't deserve it. It's your land and you should build something on it, even a shed or an irrigation system for crops. Work hard buddy
Honest answer - if you're not living in it, as long as you have time/money, you could get it done. But it's realistically a tear-down. You're basically rebuilding the house at this point, I guarantee that it needs all new plumbing, wiring, septic, etc. So you're replacing everything. How much is too much, for your budget? When/if do you plan to live in it? What's the neighborhood like, for potential rental income?
I mean, with some study and going slowly, you might get some of it done. You want professionals dealing with the roof, and electrical/plumbing.
This has every red flag for being a complete money pit. To what end? What is your final plan for the house? What is your realistic potential here?
If you plan to live in it, that's one thing. But if you want to fix it up to flip it, you could put a bunch of money into it, but won't be able to sell it for what it's now worth, if prices are lower in that area.
Your time, your money. Could be a big toilet you flush a big chunk of your paycheck into every month, for little or no return.
Like another anon said, get an inspector in there. Go over every inch of the house. Then get estimates from electricians, plumbers, and hvac for what they consider to be legal/recommended upgrades, while you get the shell of the house repaired. Maybe call around local contractors and see if they'd be willing to consult and just sit down and write you out a general plan, and throw them some of the work, like the roof.
Get the foundation checked first, like other anons have said. If that's fricked, you're fricked.
Stone foundation nuff said
A house is only as good as it’s foundation
Boy anon, that house needs some very serious work just from what i can see. Depending on your financial situation you may just want to tear that thing down and put down a prefabricated home on it for cheap.. It could just be your covered porch and it's roof needs to be torn off and redone but i doubt it. I bet that has those dreadful slatboard walls with plaster over it too, if that's that case adn there isn't asbestos in the walls you'll want to gut the house down to the studs and probably take up all the subfloors and it'll likely need some floor joists replaced and a foundation redone. I mean you could technically live in it as is, and you could just do the minimum to make it safe to live in but you'd have to pay the piper eventually when it becomes no longer safe.
floor joist work on a house like that isn't too bad if you have the subfloor torn up, you're not going to be able to live in the house at the same time as you're doing this though. I've replaced the vast majority of floor joists in my home, and a lot of the subfloor. It's very hard work but doable by one person. plumbing, electrical work, and framing are all harder, you gotta get stuff a lot more accurate, floor joists are like the easiest thing. Having done remodels myself i learned a lot but it DESTROYED my knees, i don't recommend it.
You lie
Prepare to get scammed
I was in a similar situation and basically had to renovate the house two times because almost every single person i hired cut corners hoping I would be too stupid to notice
for example when i replaced the windows the guy came and installed them, he tried to charging me the rest of the money before i could try opening and closing them, when i tried them, half the windows were shaped like trapezoids and couldn't even close properly, turns out they were leftovers from a previous project that he had laying around
had to do the plumbing two times
had to do all the wiring two times, the first electrician I hired tried to frick me over lying to me about the dimensions of the cables, the ones he installed were much thinner than the ones I asked him to buy and were useless for a house that size, i measured them myself to check before he installed them.
basically you have to assume every single person you hire to do any sort of work on the house will try to scam and frick you over in some way, even when they have 30 or 40 years of work experience meaning it should be relatively simple for them to do it
looking back it was a mistake renovating the house, if I could go back i'd just tear it down and sell the scrap and the land.