Final Curtain on Our Energy Efficient Home Renovation

A wise man once said: “If you live in the past, you are depressed. If you live in the future, you are anxious. If you live in the present, you are happy.”  I feel as though my husband and I are finally living in the present in our finished energy efficient home renovation.  We bought the house in May 2013 and moved in August 2014, that’s, like, a lot of months.

The final tally on cost: well…let’s just say including what we paid for the house, it’s right around $200k.  Since we purchased the home, comparable properties have been purchased renovated and sold way in our favor in the Plaza Shamrock neighborhood. Our first energy bill came $73.00 for fully functioning 1800 sq/ft.  That bill is half what we were paying in half the space before we moved. In addition to the numbers and boring bills, the house is a home and a pleasure to live in.

Anyone who knows us or has followed this renovation, at all, knows the struggles we encountered.  We finished with the 3rd contractor to work on the job, Jeff Jennings at J-Squared Construction.  He really was fantastic to work with!  I will work with him again, and we are still friends (I think).

Cost and time are so inextricably linked, at one point we were watching dollars fly out the window as the house sat dormant through the winter months.  As the project progressed, hard expensive decisions needed to be made, which added time and money. For instance, full industrial waterproofing around foundation, done by Ed Homer of Homer Construction and Rodney Carrington.  In the end, what we spent on making the house stronger and more efficient is money very well spent.  We learned a lot from the heartaches and can appreciate the valuable experience (now that it’s over).

The moral of the story is “perseverance is better than defeat” I got that quote out of a fortune cookie, and I’m still not entirely sure what it means.  We love our home and will do this again, in fact stand by for our next project, Coming Soon to a neighborhood near you.

Please enjoy the full Airlie before pics and Final After Pics albums on my Cassee Cunningham Facebook page.  And, let me know your thoughts.