Why You Should (Almost) Always Renovate Your Home in Stages
Renovating or remodeling a home is a difficult, expensive, and stressful endeavor. The cost of a home remodel these days averages around $50,000 , but can be much higher depending on the size and condition of your home, and the ambition of your plans. These are the numbers that could turn someone’s hair gray. And it’s not just the expense: the average renovation takes about three months —that’s three months of dust, debris, strangers in your home, or living in a rented apartment while the work is done.
Of course, this assumes you’re doing the whole house at once. While there are certain efficiency benefits to renovating your entire home at once, there are also special circumstances where renovating in stages —tackling each part of your home as a separate project, with breaks in between each stage—makes more sense.
Money
The first reason to consider a phased renovation is money: for example, do you have an endless supply of it? Almost a third of home renovations go over budget , and you’re encouraged to set aside an extra 10-15% of your budget for surprises. Once you start opening up the walls and digging into your home’s infrastructure, you’ll almost inevitably discover hidden problems and unexpected costs.
If your home renovation budget is very limited and you have no room for surprises, staged renovations may be a better choice because you can better adapt to problems. If you’re starting with a kitchen, for example, and it costs you $10,000 more than you expected, you can hit the pause button and build up your savings or secure additional financing before moving on to the next step. If you start with a phased approach, you can plan for it, leaving yourself plenty of breathing room to save up and pay off the financing in the interim.
Time
If you plan to stay in the home for a long time, renovating in stages may make more sense than renovating everything all at once. First, there is no specific deadline for completing the job, and your contractors will not have to work under pressure to complete everything by a certain date. The longer time frame and phased approach also means that discovering needed and unexpected repairs won’t throw everything into chaos – you can have the problem dealt with calmly and the rest of your home will still be fully usable.
Having time to play gives you another advantage: if the contractor you hired for the job early on doesn’t work (their work is substandard or he was a pain to work with), you can pay him off and look for a contractor. an alternative crew for the next leg, instead of being held hostage by the huge deposit you’ve already paid them.
Logistics
Going through a whole house renovation is a miserable experience . From eating food cooked in the microwave for months to finding all your clothes covered in fine, maddening dust, being in the same house while workers take it apart and rebuild it is 100% no fun. That’s why many people choose to renovate before moving or rent a nearby property to live in for a few months while contractors work their magic.
But it can be a lot of money, especially with rising rents . And moving your entire life into a temporary home comes with its own set of stresses; It’s easy to constantly feel unsettled and uncomfortable—feelings that can be magnified if you have children or pets who may not understand why their lives have just been disrupted. Step-by-step renovations will make it easier for you to stay in your home, saving money and remaining in a comfortable, familiar environment with much less disruption.
Another aspect of logistics that has improved with the phased update is the ability to dynamically evolve your design and plans. If you’ve ever chosen tile for a pressure backsplash and actively hated it every day for ten years, you know how difficult it can be to figure out every detail of a remodeling project. With a gradual update, you can easily edit and revise your plans based on the experience of the previous segment – if something does not turn out the way you imagined, you can review and adjust. If you’re overwhelmed by the thought of creating a plan for every room in the house, going through it step by step may be less stressful and give you more flexibility.