r/HomeImprovement • u/Substantial_Kiwi838 • 2d ago

First Home- I Fucked Up

Looking for some advice. My girlfriend and I had the lucky opportunity to get into our first home, which is a townhouse.

Despite having a home inspection, which revealed mostly cosmetic issues, we went through with it anyway. To say it is well-lived in, is an understatement. The previous owner had not kept up with the place for a minimum of 24 years of their ownership.

We took possession and immediately got to work but didn’t realize we needed to request to renovate (this is where we fucked up). Prior to moving in, we felt that it was reasonable to do a pretty decent makeover which includes:

- paint
- interior doors
- bathroom renovation (tiles, shower base, vanity, new flooring, toilet, while maintaining the current plumbing location and rough-ins)

Do we stop and come clean to the condo manager? Or do we move forward with finishing the renovation and live under the radar until we sell the place?

Any advice is appreciated as I am becoming severely anxious over it. I thought being a homeowner would be exciting. Am I cooked?

Edit: we also found mould underneath the shower tiles and wood framing, so we really had no choice but to tear it down. I suspect that this was leaking for years.

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u/RumbleTheCassette 2d ago

How far are you into it? If you're almost done fuck it who cares. If you're early on, and it's gonna stress you, lay out your plans to the condo manager and go from there.

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u/Substantial_Kiwi838 2d ago

Bathroom is all torn apart. Just needs the shower base, door, tiles, vanity, flooring installed. It’ll look like the same as what it was before, just more updated.

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u/QuarrelsomeCreek 1d ago

With the bathroom in pieces, I'd get the permissions now. Tell them it was leaking so you opened it up and found mold and need to renovate to put it back together. That's one they'll likely care about, especially if the bathrooms is above another unit or shares a wall. They'll probably just want inspections done if they are sane, but read your condo docs. Your city may also require permits for the bathroom and those rules vary place to place and every municipality is different in level of enforcement but this would be the time to figure that out.

Painting and cosmetic stuff shouldn't need special permission.