Whole-Home Renovation

Why one project beats five

Homeowners often plan to renovate room by room over several years. It feels lower-risk and easier to budget. In practice it usually costs more, because you pay the setup cost of a construction project five separate times: five mobilizations, five permit applications, five rounds of dust protection, and five opportunities for the new work to not quite match what you did two years earlier.

More importantly, the systems in a house don’t respect room boundaries. If the electrical panel needs replacing, you want to do that once, with every wall already open.

What we find in older Lincoln homes

We’ve renovated enough pre-1980 housing stock here to know what’s behind the plaster. Expect at least a few of these:

• Knob-and-tube or ungrounded wiring, which most insurers now refuse to cover
• Galvanized supply lines that have silted down to a fraction of their original diameter
• Cast iron drain stacks with rot at the hub joints
• Undersized 60- or 100-amp panels with no capacity for a modern kitchen, let alone an EV charger
• Asbestos in floor tile, mastic, duct wrap and popcorn ceilings
• Zero wall insulation and vermiculite in the attic

None of this is a disaster. All of it is expensive to discover in month four. We budget a contingency line of 10–15% on whole-home work and we show it to you as a line item rather than burying it in the price.

Staying in the house, or not

We can phase a whole-home renovation so you keep a functioning kitchen and bathroom throughout, sealing off zones behind temporary walls and working through the house in sections.

It adds roughly 15–20% to the schedule and 8–12% to the cost, and it is genuinely unpleasant for the months it lasts. When clients ask, we tell them the honest version: if you can move out, move out. If you can’t, we’ll make it work — we’ve done it many times.

How we keep it accountable

A project this long needs more structure than a handshake and a phone number:

• A published schedule with named milestones, updated and re-issued weekly
• A standing Friday walkthrough with your project manager
• All change orders priced and signed before the work happens, never after
• A shared photo log of everything that gets covered up
• A full closeout binder at handover