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We’re considering a fairly large project, essentially refreshing the whole main floor rather than one room at a time. Flooring, kitchen, powder room, some wall changes. The scale is making me nervous about cost overruns, since everyone I know who has done something like this ends up well over what they planned. How do you keep a project like this from spiraling, and is doing it all at once actually cheaper than in phases? The house was built in the mid nineties and hasn’t been meaningfully updated since, so I assume there are surprises waiting behind at least one of those walls.
All at once is usually cheaper per square foot because trades mobilize once rather than four times, and you only live through the disruption one time. The spiral comes from mid project changes and from unknowns behind walls in older houses, so build a contingency of ten to fifteen percent and treat it as spent. Lock selections before demo starts. We did Bellevue Home Remodeling on our main floor and the changes we made after the fact were the only line items that hurt. Ask for an allowance schedule so you can see exactly where the estimate assumes a placeholder price. Ask for the contingency to be a named line rather than folded into the total, it’s easier to track that way.
