We've been looking at some properties, and it seems that we are probably not going to be able to find a 3 bedroom apartment, unit or townhouse in our desired areas and in our price range PROBABLY (we've found one, but it's not quite right and it's also a bit above our price range unless it comes down a bit after a while of being on the market. Also we're not ready to sell our own place yet, so it's not practical. But in theory, it exists, though is very much a rarity).
So we've become interested in 2 bedroom townhouse or villa-type places with internal access garages.
We got this idea from a place we looked at a few weeks ago that had an internal small courtyard (the rest of the unit surrounded this little courtyard) and that had a garage with the internal access wall being glass sliding doors, so it felt more like a rumpus room.
We got to thinking that we could use such a garage for our music studio / library. Much better than trying to squash into a spare bedroom with all our billions of bookcases and musical instruments!
So I'm now wondering how much it'd cost to convert a garage...and I don't mean a full conversion. We wouldn't take out the garage door cause whenever we'd sell, people might want to use it as a garage and wouldn't like having to pay to convert it back, you know?
We'd just do the following...
- Put up some kind of "false" wall just in front of the garage door, so it didn't feel like a garage. The wall would be stable and strong, but could fairly easily be removed by anyone wanting to use it as a garage.
- Put in a ceiling fan and nice normal "inside" light (not the standard garage fleuro ones, blegh!)
- Do anything required to the ceiling / roof. Insulation I assume. And then some sort of ceiling panels.
- Put down some sort of flooring. I'd like carpet, but would choose cheaper and easily removable things like carpet tiles, or a cheap floating floor and then put large rugs on it.
- Install a phone outlet (not line, just an outlet / extension) in the room so we could have the net without trailing cords and wires all through the house
- Render and then paint the walls
So...I'm estimating this might cost between $5,000 - $10,000. Is this over or under estimating, do you think?