When to Phase Your Whole House Remodeling Project
If you’re like most homeowners, you probably have a never-ending list of home maintenance and remodeling projects that you plan to tackle someday, but whether you should add phases into your whole house remodeling project or knock all your projects out at once is where things get fuzzy. Your challenge isn’t necessarily deciding what you’d like to do – you’ve got that figured out – but how to prioritize the list and decide which order to complete the projects to make the most of your investment and save time.
Required Home Maintenance: Must Do Projects
Some projects must go to the top of the list to keep your home safe, such as upgrading electrical or mechanical systems. Then some projects keep your home from falling too far into disrepair, such as addressing structural issues or a roof that is at the end of its useful life. While one could argue it’s not fun spending money on any of those projects, they’re a necessary part of responsible homeownership and typically take precedent over the pretty projects when lumping them all together isn’t feasible for whatever reason.
Highly Desirable Home Improvements
After required home maintenance projects, you have optional but highly desirable home improvement projects. These are not emergencies needed to have a safe and secure home, but they’re high on your list because they’ll improve the functionality, aesthetics, and comfort of your daily life. Kitchen and bathroom remodels, redesigning the floor plan, upgrading your fireplace, screening a porch, or building an addition are all examples of highly desirable projects.
When this list is long, first determine if your goals are feasible for your existing home or whether you should just move. Many families prefer to ‘rip off the band-aid’ and just do them all at once if they stay in their current home. In other instances, you can phase projects over time. We have three questions to ask yourself that’ll help you decide which approach works best for you when your entire home needs remodeling.
Should You Phase Your Whole House Remodeling Project?
When considering whether to add phases into your whole house remodeling project and partition it out into smaller chunks, investment, disruption, and isolation are the three most significant factors to consider.
1. Do You Have the Resources?
Do you have the funding available to be able to invest in one large project comfortably? If so, great! Continue with questions two and three to determine which scenario is best for your circumstances. If not, no worries. It’s perfectly reasonable to do one thing at a time as you phase your whole home remodel, especially when the changes would immediately improve your quality of life to the extent that waiting until you can do more at once isn’t an attractive proposition.
2. How Many Disruptions Can You Tolerate?
If you can afford one large project, consider how much disruption your family can tolerate. Depending on the scope of work, you may need to move out during construction. It is not feasible to relocate to a temporary home in many cases, and phasing is preferable.
Staying in your home during the remodeling is often manageable if the project doesn’t displace you from major sections of the house. Bathrooms are the perfect example. If your main bathroom needs remodeling, it’s easy enough to relocate to the guest room and use another bathroom while yours is under construction.
Being displaced from common areas such as the kitchen and breakfast room can prove a bit more challenging. The whole family uses kitchens for various tasks throughout the day, and if you’re like most of our clients, you only have one. If you choose to live at home during your kitchen remodel, you’ll need to find a place to temporarily set up appliances, store food and dishes, and adjust your meal prepping. Think of it as an extended camping trip at home.
3. Will Elements of the Project Bleed into Other Areas of the Home?
It’s simple enough to sequester off the bathrooms, kitchen, or home office and tackle those one at a time if you cannot do them simultaneously. Still, once some aspects of those spaces start to bleed into other areas of your home, phasing becomes much more difficult.
If walls are coming down and flooring will be interrupted, all the hardwoods on that floor will need refinishing simultaneously, so they match. Anytime floors are refinished, all the furniture on that floor must be relocated upstairs or to a storage unit, and you must vacate the house for at least a week (perfect time for a vacation). Open floor plans provide few places to distinguish one room from another, so plan on repainting all the continuous walls.
Whole Home Remodeling Advantages
You’ve decided whole house remodeling is the way to go. Whether you’re moving into a temporary rental, or you’ve just purchased a new place and want to have it completely remodeled before you move in, you’re likely going to experience the following advantages:
1. Economies of Scale
Most remodeling companies will have a fixed set of costs regardless of how large a project is. The plumber must drive to the site whether he’s installing one faucet or four. When more work is done on a whole house remodel, many of those costs can be spread out over the project in a more economical way, giving you the most bang for your buck over the long haul.
2. Save Time
While there are many decisions to be made, and it can be a little overwhelming, lean on your designer to curate the best options for creating a cohesive aesthetic. Making decisions for the whole house at once invites a creative flow, which speeds up the design and specification process. Construction will also be considerably shorter when multiple trades are on site at once, working on more than one space simultaneously.
3. Less Stress in the Long Run
Temporarily relocating doesn’t come without stress or challenges. Still, one could argue it would be much easier to tolerate than living on an active construction site for weeks (or months) at a time, at various intervals over several years. There’s also something to be said for putting the project behind you once completed. Being able to enjoy your new home without having to think about what you’ll do after you’ve recovered from your current project brings a new level of satisfaction.
Meeting with an established and reputable Charlotte remodeling firm with experience in projects great and small is a great place to start. If your home improvement list is long and you need help figuring out whether whole house remodeling or another approach is best for your long-term goals. Schedule a call with one of our Project Developers to begin building a strategy to re-create your new home.