Quotable Quotes

First of all, the few commenters were right about the electric. BUT, that's because it turns out that even though the knob and tube is only on 4 circuits, it's wired to almost every light fixture and outlet in the house. How is that even possible? Who knows. But we do need to make the house safe, so we'll probably move forward with the rewiring. It will encompass the basement, first, and second floors (minus the kitchen, since we'll be gutting that next spring if all goes according to plan).

So far we've gotten 3 quotes (waiting on 2 more) that range from $7,500 - $13,000. Yikes. Just a leeeetle over our $3,000 off-the-cuff estimate.

On the bright side, the heating and air conditioning should come well within our estimate. So far our prices have ranged from about $6,000-$8,500 for similar systems (from what I can tell). None of them will be able to heat/cool the 3rd floor efficiently, so we'll have to decide whether to live with the baseboard heat and window a/c up there, or to put in a ductless heating and air unit for the 3rd floor. I suppose it depends how much that'd run us! One HVAC installer quoted $3,300 for that, which seems excessive. If we can keep it closer to $1,500 I think we'd go for it.

I'm hoping that we'll have all of the quotes in by the end of this week and decisions made next week. Then it'll be moving on to refinishing the floors...

Finding Contractors

I joined Angie's List today - hopefully it'll be worth the $23 for the year. I think so. There seems to be a lack of info on Pittsburgh businesses. In Atlanta, Kudzu was a pretty good option for us.

I used a coupon code from http://www.retailmenot.com to get 40% off! I am always up for a deal.

I spent naptime looking for hvac and electrician recommendations. Time to get cracking on this stuff!

Step 1: Pre-move checklist

Over the last week, we've hammered out what we'll be tackling pre-move. It's not much in terms of dealing with things from far away - just expensive! I expect these will cost $12-15k total.

Heating & Plumbing

• Our inspectors found a gas leak in the gas... thingy. So that needs to be fixed. We'll ask them to do that when they
• Install a new furnace. We'll get a few different quotes, but if anyone has information on great furnaces, please leave a comment!
• Heat and cold air return registers - currently these are in the floor on the 1st floor, with only one GIANT gaping register for cold air return. We'd like to move these into the baseboard, and add cold air returns so we can patch up the floors and make the areas more useable.
• Add central air conditioning to the house
  

Electrical Updates

• Replace the old knob and tube wiring with updated stuff. If need be, we might update to a 200 amp service, but I'm hoping we can make due with what we have. We'll see what the electrician says. Hopefully this won't cost too much, but we're budgeting $2k to be safe
  

Refinish Hardwoods

• This is going to include patching the floors where we move the heat registers. It won't include the kitchen - I'm not sure if there is hardwood under the linoleum in there. We'll deal with that when we renovate the kitchen.