1st Rehab: Water Damage + Mold?

[Steven Tierney]

Hi everybody,

I finally viewed a property I've had my eye on for a while now here in Massachusetts and I am intrigued by it because of it's location in a coastal town with good resale values (I have a post going about the same property with a vacant adjacent lot).  Anyways, the house has a great layout, good stats in terms of SF/Beds/Baths, but the entire kitchen and adjacent rooms (or portions of them at least) would need to be gutted due to water damage and mold issues.  The house has been winterized, but before it was, a pipe (or 10) must have burst somewhere and there must have been water leaking happening for a long time before anybody saw it.  The sellers did a quick clean up job (debris removal, sweep floors) it looks like, but portions of the ceiling had fallen off, hardwood floors are swollen, baseboard moldings swollen off of walls, etc.  Anyways, the kitchen would have needed to be redone anyways in this house (early 1990's style) so the location of the majority of the damage isn't necessarily bad.  There are visible mold spots on a lot of the directly affected areas.  In the basement, there are a few drywalled partition walls and those are covered in mold too.

 I've contacted a few local mold remediation places to go out to the house and give me an estimate of demo/remediation costs so I have a ballpark idea of what it'd be so I can factor into my repair costs/70% rule.

Questions:

Does anybody have experience with this, cautionary tales, etc.?  Maybe this is naive of me, but I'm looking at using the mold remediation to my advantage because it justifies a lower offer for me for the property.  The house needs cosmetic updates anyways, so I would have already gotten a GC involved for those, and assume they will add the cost of "putting the place back together" into their estimate.  Am I taking the right course of action here?  Should I take the remediation estimates I get at face value, or should I bump them up by 25-50% or something?  In general - is this project too complex for a first time rehab property?

I greatly appreciate your feedback!