in my experience the success of a zoning variance is solely dependent on locality.

$100+ a sq' for a garage doesn't seem right. I'm not positive but I think a builder I know who is at the top of a price range starts at $100 a sq' for a custom home

I'd call builders and contractors and ask for a rough sq' price to build a garage. I'd expect to get an answer like, typically you can expect to start at $x sq' for a standard garage. That's a starting point, I'd need to look at the plans to give a more accurate price

National average seems to be about $150 a square for a home, but here in SoCal I think it's more like $250 and gets a lot higher for custom homes.

This seems about right from what I've been hearing as well in this area though I suspect even a builder-grade $150/SF home would sell at a higher price than a median home in almost all but the most exclusive neighborhoods. I think there's some disconnect in terms of what qualifies as low/mid/high-end in online discussions due to the fact that most people who make a good living in the industry and comment intelligently on this topic on the internet work disproportionately on higher-end stuff, while the actual people who do most of the work for average homeowners are handymen types and inexperienced contractors that hire from the bottom of the barrel.

Edit: I guess that's before we include people who just don't do much renovation and live with what they've got and others who, despite not being particularly skilled or interested, DIY in order to save money. I suspect it's possible the very idea of hiring people to everything is a luxury most people can't afford.

Anyway, looks like we won't do a garage at this time - we don't really need one so we will probably wait till we're ready to do an extension and go for an attached garage at the same time. Does anyone have experience with hiring a professional landscaper? Our yard is naturally sloped and we wanted to do some leveling with retaining walls and create some flat areas within the yard. Is this going to be super expensive too? We're okay spending around 20K for this, including leveling, patio, retaining walls with stairs as necessary and obviously some trees and what not, but not sure if it's nearly enough.

I got confused by my post there for a second. Square foot, not square. That's important as a square is a 100 square feet at least in roofer talk.

Moved into our new place almost a year ago and a home warranty came with it. We are coming up to the renewal or not stage. It's about $520 a year with a $75 deductible. Anyone have thoughts on the pros and cons? I generally feel like these kinds of warranties are obviously negative ev with a chance to suck out.

Scam

Insurance is almost always -EV as I'm sure most gamblers understand, but it's also a bit of scam or be scammed. Not exactly, but if you routinely make mountains of molehills, are a squeaky wheel, don't easily take no for an answer and don't mind the fight, then maybe it's +EV.

That makes sense.

What exactly does a home warranty cover?

I just sold my big dumb house and bought a much cheaper and older home. I'm looking to do some renovation to the kitchen as well as potentially removing a wall or 2. Im thinking in the 20k range. I've never designed anything and quite frankly don't know where to start. Designer? Architect? Builder?

The design would be more for my own lifestyle rather than resale. The house is a 1k sq ft ranch and cost around 100k.

this is way high in my experience, especially for a national average. I can build a house in the 3k-4.5k s.f. range in one of the nicest suburbs on Indy for <$100/s.f. from a decent home builder. This includes finished basement s.f., but is pretty common. I know socal is an anomaly wrt home prices, so i get that you're probably used to higher.

There isn't an easy answer to this. On average, you're going to get the best results from an architect, but there's a whole lot of variance in that average and you'll often end up paying a premium for sub-par work. Personally, I'm biased against unlicensed home designers who have no construction experience, and in favor of design-build firms.

Talk to friends/family/coworkers for recommendations. Find out who is available in your area that does the sort of work you want and look at projects they've done.

Realistic answer for your price range: It's probably going to be the builder. You can also get "free" kitchen design services from whoever you get cabinets from, which will be about as good as you can expect from somebody who sells cabinets for a living.

Major appliances. One of my wife's friends "won" the bet because they needed heir entire furnace system replaced. We had an inspection on our furnace and it was good. Our water heater is near the end of its life. Our ac seems fine. We decided not to renew.

I don't think this is quite right.

You might be correct. It came with the house when we bought it so I didn't particularly care about the details since there was no decision involved at the time. That's the way my wife explained it to me after having it explained by our realtor, so when you add me in the chain there are three questionable links. I'll take a look at the renewal notice this weekend and report back.

It will cover repairing just about any appliance, but good luck getting anything replaced.

My dishwasher, which has been messing up in various other ways for the last 1.5 years, now is not dispensing any water during the wash cycles. The lights are all working, and it makes all kinds of noises, but no water. It came with my house and is ~10 years old at this point. Is it worth having a repairman take a look at it, or should I just replace it? Fwiw guests will comment about it being a nice/expensive dishwasher (I have no idea about these things), but it never seemed to clean the dishes particularly well to me.

Seems like this is the time to replace it. Dont forget to haggle when buying your new one.

Sounds like a water valve. Usually a generally inexpensive part and something you can fix yourself

I was able to get it going again for the time being...

Can you haggle for appliances at Lowes/HD? or only mom and pop?

I have heard of people haggling at big box stores on appliances but never have myself. One thing you can do is stop by the post office and get a change of address kit that will give you a coupon for hd or lowes (can't remember which but the other one will honor it regardless) for 10 or 20% off.

You can buy those Lowe's coupons on Ebay for a buck or 2. The best ones used to be $15 off $50 but they just did away with those and replaced them with various coupons that amount to 20% off.

The best part is you can order everything online and have it ready to pick up in store. This also allows you to use an endless # of coupons by placing multiple orders.

The $15 off $50 used to be great and when remodeling my place I'd frequently place 10-15 separate orders totaling as close to $50 each as possible. It saved me nearly 4k on the materials and everything was on a cart and ready to go when I got to the store.

My only experience with the system was when I moved and actually used the coupon for some garage shelving. I had to go back and get more the next day and they honored the discount without a coupon.