Why You Should (Almost) Always Renovate Your Home in Phases

Renovating or remodeling a house is a complex, expensive, and stressful experience. The cost of remodeling a house averages close to $50,000 these days, but can be much higher depending on the size and condition of your house and the ambition of your plans. Those are the kind of numbers that can turn someone’s hair white. And it’s not just the expense: Renovations take close to three months, on average—that’s three months of dust, debris, strangers in your home, or living in a rental while the work gets done.

Of course, that assumes you’re doing the whole house all at once. While there are distinct benefits in terms of efficiency to having your whole house renovated at the same time, there are also specific circumstances when a phased renovation—doing each part of your home as a separate project with down time in between each phase—makes more sense.

Money

The first reason to consider a phased renovation is money—as in, do you have an endless supply of it? Nearly one-third of home renovations go over budget, and you’re well-advised to put aside an extra 10-15% of the budget for surprises. Once you start opening up walls and digging into your home’s infrastructure, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll find hidden problems and unexpected costs.

If your budget for your home renovation is super tight and you don’t really have any room for surprises, a phased renovation might be a better choice because you can better adapt to problems. If you start with your 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 more financing before you commit to the next phase. Starting off with a phased approach means you can plan for this, leaving yourself plenty of breathing room to save up and pay off financing inbetween.

Time

If you’re planning to stay in the home for a long time, a phased renovation can make more sense than renovating everything everywhere all at once. For one thing, there’s no deadline to get the work done, and your contractors won’t have to work under the pressure of getting everything finished by a certain date. A longer timeline and a phased approach also mean that discovering necessary and unexpected repairs won’t throw everything into chaos—you can calmly address the problem and, in the meantime, the rest of your home is still perfectly usable.

Having time to play with gives you another advantage: If the contractor you hired to work on early phases doesn’t work out—their work is sub-par, or they were stressful to work with—you can pay them off and look for an alternative crew for the next phase, instead of being held hostage by the huge deposit you’ve already paid them.

Logistics

Living through a whole-house renovation is a miserable experience. From eating microwaved meals for months to finding all of your clothes covered in a fine, maddening dust, being in the same house while workers tear it apart and rebuild it is 100% not fun. That’s why a lot of people choose to renovate before they move in, or rent a nearby property to live in for a few months while their contractors do their magic.

But that can be a lot of money, especially with rents soaring. And moving your whole life into a temporary home carries its own kind of stress; it’s easy to feel constantly unsettled and cramped—feelings that can be enhanced if you have children or pets who may not understand why their lives have just been disrupted. With a phased renovation you can more easily remain in the home, saving money and staying in a comfortable, familiar environment with much less disruption.

Another aspect of logistics that’s improved with a phased renovation is the ability to dynamically evolve your design and plans. If you’ve ever chosen a backsplash tile under pressure and spent a decade actively hating it every day, you know the struggle of figuring out every single detail of a remodel project. With a phased renovation you can easily edit and revise your plans based on the experience of the last segment—if something doesn’t turn out the way you imagined, you can reconsider and adjust. If you’re overwhelmed at the thought of coming up with a plan for each and every room in the house, taking it phase by phase can be less stressful and give you more flexibility.

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