Is everyone getting lump sum prices for repairs or piecemealing it?

I don't know if I am rushing things since we have not had an adjuster at the house yet (no flood insurance). But the house is about dried out and I purchased a few exterior doors and the drywall, tape and mud. I have a one man show contractor already give me pricing and I should have two companies that I have had work done with coming out this week.

Do we want to share price per sqft of projects to get an idea of things?

Please tell me more about where to get such doors...

jayelbee said:

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Don't buy anything from Home Depot or Lowes. These stores are for when you need a single 2x4 to fix a fence or a toilet flapper because the tank leaks.

Your local lumber yard will give you better prices, better material, and better lead times. You can also get access to things that big boxes don't sell like pre-shrunk doors with casing already installed.

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While I'll agree that there are better building supply places to acquire products than HD\Lowes, you can acquire prehung doors through both. I know HD also offers some sort of "contractor" pricing on orders of $1000 or more. Supposedly they submit your order and apply discounts depending on the items in the order.

Where should I look for custom doors? I need a 24" exterior door with windows.

Who should I be looking to for cabinets and counter tops?

Flooring?

Quote:

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Cabinets are trickier. I actually need a good contact that can take some ****ty builder grade bases and stain them to match and use the old fronts. My alternative is to replace uppers and lowers 100%, but I don't want to spend that kind of cheddar on a house I'm not keeping.

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If you've got builders grade cabinets you're probably going to save yourself time, money and headache to just get new builders grade cabinets and replace the uppers. Builders grade cabinets are cheap.

Even if you have the faces and doors you probably have at least one exposed side to stain and will need toekick and scribe stained and likely some filler stained to maintain the existing footprint. Then you have to hope the stain actually matches. That depends a lot on your tolerance but it never matches 100% and if you want to sell you're hoping potential buyers don't notice the difference.

You also need got to get the boxes just right to fit the existing faces. It's basically a custom job and good custom work costs a lot. The only people who are going to do that work are freelance types where quality is often suspect and risk is high that they run with your money when they realize they can't get it right.

You could see if you can find out the cabinet manufacturer and if the style still exists. That would be your best case scenario. Otherwise I think there is a good chance you spend more money for inferior results trying to MacGuyver it than you do eating the cost of new uppers and bases. 3/4 of the cost is in the base cabinets that you're essentially replacing. You're going to pay more due to labor for the custom boxes and stain work than you would replacing it all.

I hope that helps you out a bit. There are absolutely people out there who do freelance stuff at great prices and with great quality but I think the good custom guys are doing high quality expensive work on fancy houses right now and aren't going to be available for projects like this. In downtimes maybe they'd do this stuff to keep up cash flow and stay busy but the whole industry is getting slammed right now.

My mom's adjuster is telling her that a lump sum bid will help the claim get processed faster. Her contractor is willing to add the things that he's not doing into a quote for her, so he's doing that.

She's being told that anything in the exterior envelope of the structure that sat in water is covered, this includes any windows and doors.