Whole Home Renovation Decisions to Make Before Work Starts
A whole home renovation is mostly a sequence of decisions. The building part is predictable. The decisions are what slow jobs down and what drive costs past where a homeowner expected them to land.
This post is about the decisions that have to be made before demolition starts, and what happens to your schedule and your budget when you change one of them in week nine.
Scope comes first, and scope means rooms and walls
Before anything else, you need a clear answer to one question. Which rooms are being touched, and how far does the work go in each one?
"Whole home" means different things to different people. For some it means new kitchen, new baths, refinished floors, paint. For others it means moving walls, opening up a first floor, finishing an attic, replacing windows, and redoing the electrical and plumbing behind the walls.
Those are different projects with different costs and different timelines. Pick one before you ask anyone to price the work.
The wall decisions are the expensive ones to revisit. If a wall is load bearing, removing it later means engineering, a beam, posts, and often work on the foundation or framing below it. That is not a small adjustment to a plan that is already in motion. It is a new small project inside your project, with its own permit and its own inspection.
Where water, drains, and power go
Plumbing locations are harder to change than people expect. Drain lines need slope. That slope has to fit inside your floor structure. Moving a toilet four feet in an older home can mean cutting joists, adding support, or dropping a ceiling below.
So decide the kitchen and bathroom layouts early, down to where the sink, range, and toilet sit. Decide whether you want a tub or only a shower. Decide if you want a second floor laundry. These all set pipe routes.
Electrical is more forgiving, but only before the walls close. Once insulation and drywall go in, adding an outlet, a sconce location, or a circuit for a range means cutting open finished work and patching it. Walk the house during framing with a flashlight and a list. Think about where you charge things, where you read, where you want switches, and whether you want hardwired lighting or lamps.
Mechanical systems are a scope question too. If the electrical panel, heating, or supply lines are near the end of their life, replacing them during a gut renovation is far cheaper than doing it after you have new floors and new paint.
Live in the house or move out
Decide this early and be honest about it. Living in a house during a whole home renovation is possible in phases, but phasing costs money. Crews work in smaller areas, set up and break down protection repeatedly, and wait on each other. The same work takes longer.
Moving out usually shortens the schedule and reduces disruption cost. It adds rent or a long stay somewhere else. There is no universally correct answer. There is only the answer you decide on before the schedule is built, because the schedule depends on it.
Finishes, earlier than feels necessary
Tile, cabinets, countertops, plumbing fixtures, flooring, interior doors, and hardware all need to be selected before the trades that install them show up. Many items have lead times measured in weeks or months. Custom cabinetry and some window orders are longer.
It feels strange to choose a shower valve when the house is still full of furniture. Do it anyway. A valve choice determines what gets installed inside the wall before tile goes on. Change the valve after tile and you are paying to remove tile.
What a change actually costs
Homeowners usually think of a change as the price difference between option A and option B. That is the smallest part of it. The real cost shows up in these places.
- Rework. Removing or undoing finished work, and paying for the material that is now in a dumpster.
- Labor out of sequence. Trades work in a set order. Bringing one back for a second trip costs more than the first trip did.
- Lead times. A new order can stall a room, and a stalled room can stall the rooms after it.
- Restocking and custom orders. Some items can be returned with a fee. Custom sizes, colors, and cabinetry usually cannot be returned at all.
- Permits and inspections. Structural, plumbing, and electrical changes can require updated drawings and another inspection before work continues.
- Schedule. Every week the job runs long is another week of living somewhere else, or living in it.
A change made on paper before demolition is close to free. The same change made after rough inspection is expensive. After finishes, it can cost several times the original line item.
Build a contingency and treat it as real
Older homes hide things. Rot behind a shower, undersized framing, old wiring, surprises under a floor. On a whole home renovation, set aside a contingency on top of the contract amount. Many homeowners use something in the range of ten to twenty percent, with the higher end for older houses and for gut work.
That money is for discoveries, not for upgrades. If you spend it on a nicer countertop in month one, you have nothing left for the thing behind the wall.
How to make your decisions hold
Make the decisions in writing, room by room, with model numbers and finishes listed. Walk the house at demolition, at framing, and before drywall. Those three walks are when changes are still cheap.
If you are planning a whole home renovation in Cornwall On Hudson, come to the first conversation with your scope, your must haves, and your real budget. We can help you work through the rest in the order it needs to be decided.