How Do You Plan a Remodel Before You Call Anybody?

By Thomas Williams, All American Renovations · EPA Lead-Safe Certified Firm

Six things, and you can do all of them at your own kitchen table in an evening.

How to plan a remodel?

Work out whether your job needs drawings. Count the decisions you haven’t made. Narrow the ones you have. Count backwards from your deadline. Decide whether appliances are inside your budget. And look at what you’ve already got, because some of it may be worth keeping.

None of that requires a contractor, and all of it changes the conversation when you finally have one.

The reason to do it isn’t to become an expert. It’s that every one of these is something you’d otherwise find out halfway through, when it’s expensive to act on. Planning a remodel isn’t about predicting the project. It’s about moving the surprises to the front, where they’re still free.

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One note on scope. This guide is about renovating the rooms you have, in the space they’re in. Changing the shape of a room is a different kind of project and it gets its own guide.

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Work out whether your job needs drawings

Three questions. Answer them about your own room and you’ll know what kind of project you have.

1. Is any fixture changing location? Is the toilet moving, the sink moving, the range moving?
2. Are the cabinet sizes changing?
3. Is the layout of the room changing at all?

All three no, and your job doesn’t need a paid design. Selections get made, somebody measures, and you get a price. That path covers more work than people expect — new cabinets in the same sizes, new countertops, new tile, new fixtures in the same openings.

Any one of them yes, and it’s a drawn job — which means a designer and a draftsman, and that work gets billed. Read this article for Why Won’t Anybody Give Me a Price Until the Drawings Are Done?

Notice what isn’t on that list: the price. A $70,000 kitchen where everything stays put needs no design fee. A $28,000 bathroom where the toilet moves does. It’s about whether anything moves, not how big the number is.

Count the decisions you haven’t made yet

Write them down. Go room by room. Tile — floor, wall, shower. Cabinets. Countertop. Backsplash. Fixtures and hardware. Lighting. Paint. Flooring, and where it stops. Appliances. Anything being relocated.

That count is how much any quote you’re given can still move. And it moves one direction only. That’s an article all in itself.

Two unmade decisions on a vanity swap is nothing — go get three quotes and pick one. Thirty unmade decisions on a kitchen is not a job anybody can price in your driveway, and if somebody just did, you now know what you’re holding.

Then go through the list a second time and mark the ones you’d change your mind about.

That second count is what your design stage costs you, because somebody gets paid to redraw it each time. The first count predicts the construction price. The second predicts the design bill. Same list, two questions, ten minutes.

Narrow what you have decided — to two or three, not twelve

This is the single cheapest thing you can do for yourself and almost nobody does it.

Come to a designer with two options you’d be happy with, not twelve you’re curious about.

Not finalised. Narrowed. Two tiles you’d both live with. Two cabinet colours. Two countertops.

Revisions are what cost money in a design stage — the first redraft is expected, and it’s the third and fourth and fifth that burn hours. Choosing tile, then changing it, then changing the cabinets to match the new tile, then changing the countertop to match the new cabinets is three more appointments.

I’m telling you how to spend less money with us, which is a strange thing for a contractor to put on his own website. It’s also true, and it’s the part of this you control completely.

Count backwards from the date you need it finished

Cabinets alone span three days to four months. Nobody mentions that in a showroom.

What Are You Actually Paying More For?

Ready-to-assemble boxes, built on site	three days to fourteen business days
Semi-custom, standard finishes	order Monday, on site the following week
Semi-custom, a true custom colour	about three months
Full custom	six weeks at best, usually 12 to 18

So if you need to be using the room by a date, your cabinet line is a scheduling decision before it’s a taste decision. The same is true of stone, of specialty tile, and of anything that gets ordered rather than pulled off a shelf.

Work backwards from your date and you’ll know which shelf you’re shopping from.

Decide whether appliances are inside your budget or outside it

For a kitchen this is the biggest source of confusion in the entire trade, and it’s not anybody’s fault.

Some quotes include appliances. Some assume you’re buying them. Plenty don’t say either way. Which means two kitchen quotes can be $40,000 apart and be pricing the same kitchen. What does a Kitchen Remodel Cost in Middle Georgia?

Decide which it is for you, and then tell every contractor you talk to. You’ll get numbers you can actually compare.

And if a quote hands you a dollar allowance for appliances, that’s not a price. It’s a placeholder, and you find out what it was worth on the day you go shopping.

Look at what you already have

Some of it may be worth keeping, and that’s real money.

Open a cabinet door and look at a cut edge. Thin layers across the cut, like a sandwich seen from the side — that’s plywood, and it can stay. A smooth, uniform brown face with no layers — that’s MDF, and it should go.

Then put your head under the sink. Swelling along the bottom edge, a floor that’s soft when you press it, dark staining at the back corners. MDF that’s been wet is finished. Plywood that got wet and dried out is often still fine.

Keeping sound plywood boxes and spending the money on countertops, tile and fixtures instead is a genuinely good renovation. It also keeps your cabinet sizes unchanged, which — see step one — keeps you off the design-fee path.

But don’t keep cabinets you shouldn’t to dodge a design fee. If they fail in three years, your new countertops have to come off to replace them, and stone tops don’t come off and go back on. You’d be buying countertops twice to save on cabinets once.

⭐ And one thing to do on every quote you receive

Find the nouns.

Does the quote name the tile, or does it say “tile”? The cabinet line, or “cabinets”? The actual appliances, or “appliances”? Where the flooring stops — which doorway, which wall?

Count how many lines are a category instead of a thing. Every one of those is a place the price can move later.

And on a bathroom specifically: find the waterproofing. Is a system named? A named system, not “waterproofing” as a line item — and one that meets ANSI A118.10, the standard a bonded waterproof membrane under tile has to meet. If it isn’t named, that’s your first question. What Does a Bathroom Renovation Cost in Middle Georgia?

Run all of that on our quotes too. If one of our line items is a category instead of a product, ask why, and we should have a better answer than “we’ll sort that out later.”

What planning won’t do

It won’t make your project cheap. Knowing what things cost doesn’t change what they cost. What it does is stop the number moving after you’ve signed, which is a different and better thing.

It won’t remove every surprise. Nobody can price rot behind a wall or a drain line that turns out to be cast iron. Those exist and they’re real. What planning removes is the other kind of surprise — the kind where nobody wrote down what you said.

And it might tell you not to do the project yet. Some people go through this and work out that what they want costs more than they want to spend right now. That’s a useful outcome, it’s free, and I’d rather you reach it at your kitchen table than four weeks into a design engagement.

What I’d tell you if you called me

• Do step one before you phone anybody. It takes thirty seconds and it tells you whether there’s a design fee in your future.
• Do step four before you fall in love with anything. Three days to four months is a real spread.
• Narrow to two. It’s the cheapest thing on this list and it saves the most.
• Tell every contractor the same thing about appliances. Comparable numbers are worth more than a low number.
• Look at a cut edge before you assume the cabinets go. Plywood is worth keeping.
• Ask for a range on the first call, and expect to get one. Anybody who won’t tell you roughly what a bathroom or a kitchen runs around here is managing you.