Update
What a difference a year makes-
We purchased this home at the end of June 2009. We put our existing home on the market in August and it sold in 34 days; the buyer wanted us out in ten days. We moved into this one unfinished, and have been living in and working around the renovations/repairs/construction/completion ever since.
We finally finished the house this month; got our final approval from the HOA a couple of weeks ago. It turned out to be a lot more work and quite a few more dollars than we initially thought. The day
after we closed we received a long letter from the HOA outlining all the outstanding issues with the home, the landscaping, etc... Discovered a couple of weeks later that there was never a certificate of occupancy issued by the county... at one point our ever-evolving to-do list had over 200 items on it, we crossed the last one off last night...Some of the work was self inflicted (well, as long as we are doing this, we should go ahead and change this and this, too...) but most was fixing what was never completed/ and or removed by the builder.
We spent most of the last year dealing with the pool and landscaping contractors, negotiating design details with the HOA (they missed their legal disclosure window by two weeks
) and doing all lot of the interior completion and (re)work ourselves. We put in all the built-in appliances (existing spaces were of course, just barely the wrong size.) , installed new plumbing fixtures, missing light fixtures, electrical rewiring, drywall repairs, trim work, masonry, installed missing countertops, finished up the custom tile work, bath fixtures, door hardware, etc. and re-did some shoddy finish work (undoubtedly the builder lost interest toward the end.) We removed a set of leaking French doors, reworked the front courtyard, and added an extension on the paver driveway for guest parking. Put up 250' of wrought iron fence, replaced 4 missing gates, etc. Extensive landscaping was required; we added over 300 plants and trees, all on drip irrigation.
There is a silver lining... when we were finished the HOA refunded the builders completion bond to us... $XX,000, which almost exactly compensated us for what we overspent! What a windfall.
All in all we are really pleased with the result- time will tell if this is going to turn out to be a good investment. There are several comparable homes in the neighborhood listed at well over $1M; we are really hoping they get anywhere close to that... We'll need to stay here another year for capital gains issues, anyway.
Enclosed are a few "after" photos of the completed house, similar to the "before" photos in Post #1
We have to be out of our current house by Monday, and could use the help...
