5 Signs Your Renovation Plan Needs a Second Look

Most renovation overruns aren’t caused by bad luck. They’re caused by five specific gaps in the plan, and every one of them is visible before work starts if you know what to look at.

Nobody has been under the floor

If your quote was produced from a walk-around and a tape measure, it is a guess. Lifting a couple of boards and pulling a section of ceiling costs an afternoon. Not doing it costs an average of eleven per cent, in our experience, and always at the worst possible moment.

The quote has no line items

A single number at the bottom of a page tells you nothing about what happens when something changes. Ask for it broken down by trade. If a contractor won’t, it is usually because the number was reverse-engineered from what they thought you would accept.

The schedule has durations but no dates

“Eight to ten weeks” is not a schedule. Real dates expose whether the trades have actually been booked, and they give you something to hold when week eleven arrives.

There’s a contingency but no process

Every renovation needs a contingency. What matters far more is the written answer to a simple question: what happens, step by step, when we find something unexpected? If that process does not exist, the contingency is just a buffer for someone else’s mistakes.

Your contractor hasn’t said no to anything

If everything you have asked for has been met with “no problem,” you are either unusually reasonable or you are being sold to. The most reliable predictor of a good build is a contractor who pushes back early on the parts that won’t work.