Brought to you by Rufty-Peedin Design Build
Monday, October 24, 2016
Mind Your Manors Monday is a new feature that will take a look back at the previous week’s single-family and town home renovation and new building projects.
Raleigh is growing at an ever-expanding pace, but until now we’ve only looked at that growth from a commercial building perspective. That changes today.
In the past, we’ve generally run our “New Building Report” feature on Mondays, but the only qualifying project from last week is yet another new storage unit facility, this one out on Glenwood Avenue. And to be honest, we’ve run out of things to say about these kind of jobs.
There’s a lot of them in Raleigh. They are sometimes built as “placeholders” to bring in value from a piece of land the owners plan to sell or develop at some point down the road. They’re a good place to store all those excess mattresses people must be buying from one of the region’s 6,000 mattress stores (shout out to @TimDNiles on Twitter for that one ?). Etc.
No more posts about new self-storage units!
Unless it’s getting built in a really unique location or if the work is being done by the region’s premier storage unit experts, Rufty-Peedin Design Build — no one builds better storage units than them, believe me — we’re simply not going to waste 750 words going on about these places anymore. We’ll mention them in our Renovation Roundup feature, or something. You’re welcome.
Thankfully, we were able to come up with another one of our patented alliterative feature titles — personally, I’m pretty proud of this one — and now you, dear readers, will get to hear about what’s been going on in Raleigh’s booming residential construction market. Again, you’re welcome.
We’re still working out some of the kinks, so please let us know in the comments if you have any suggestions/ideas on how to improve it. Also, the City recently changed the format of the permits it releases, and we may have missed a few projects this week due to unfamiliarity with the new layout.
Piece of advice: if you’re having your home remodeled, don’t hire Homer Simpson as the General Contractor
One note: we will continue on with the Development Beat tradition of not giving the names or exact addresses of private citizens. This isn’t a gossip or a society column. I’m no Peter Fallow, after all.
New Homes Built: 17 new detached single-family dwellings last week received permits ranging from $210,982 to $1.75 million. The median price for all new homes built last week was $319,957 while the average was $430,144. The median square footage was 3,124 and the average was 3,653. That nearly two million dollar home we mentioned was also the week’s largest project at 7,629 square feet, and will be built out by Artisan Crafted Homes. Located inside-the-beltline and just north of the Carolina Country Club on Glenwood Avenue, this million-dollar home will be built on the lovely wooded lot pictured below.
Home Renovations: 50 homeowners received a total of 56 renovation/addition permits last week with a total cost of $1,899,370. The average cost of each permit was $33,917 while the median was a much lower $18,000. The average was driven up by a small handful of high-dollar renovations, the largest of which was a “rebuild” of a 336 square-foot sunroom that will cost $245,000 and be done by Don Sergent. Despite being the most expensive, the size of this sunroom project was right around the average for the week: 341 square feet. The median square footage from last week’s projects was 216, but several projects were listed with zero square feet, such as a $1,074 attic insulation job being done by Carolina Weatherization. The largest job by square footage is a $200,000 kitchen/living area/two baths/bedroom renovation being done by Residential Remedies. One final note: the most common type of project was deck-related; there were 14 of them!
We’re telling you, this is a bad idea
Home Demolitions: Five homes received demolition permits last week, none of them younger than 50 years old. The newest home was built in 1965, and all 2,391 square feet of it will be demolished by contractor Brian Sawyer for $35,000. The total cost of all five demolitions is $93,800. Worth noting is that two of the properties being torn down are both owned by an LLC named Grand Oak Properties. These homes are located at 807 and 813 E. Lane Street and were both built in 1955. The small, 1,050 SF duplex at 807 E. Lane will be torn down for a mere $6,000 by a company named Concept 8, which is also handling the job at 813 E. Lane.
Best Work Description of the Week: “Converting garage into man cave.” The all-caps “MAN CAVE” listed in the description for this $30,000 project is what caught my eye; the owner information a few columns to the right is why I added that disclaimer about not revealing people’s names or addresses. Let’s just say it’s someone high-up in the Raleigh real estate/development world, and I don’t want him to know how insanely jealous I am of a five-figure man cave that at 1,943 square feet is more than twice the size of my apartment. To list the contractor on this job would reveal the homeowner, so I won’t.
A literal man cave.
