Faster and Simpler Financing

Once we work together and establish all of the scopes of work you would like to have completed, that can all be packaged into one easy package to present to your source of financing. Clients frequently rely on their bank to help them take out a home improvement loan against the current value of their house. If you have obtained a loan recently then you know that there is lots of paperwork, meetings, and approvals – lots of hoops to jump through before you can get the money for your project secured. If you divide your projects up into separate phases to be done over a period of months or years, you will usually need to get separate financing each time you wish to start a new phase. If you take our package all at once then you can eliminate lots of these annoying trips and meetings.

More Efficient Permits and Inspections

The permitting process for a substantial remodel will cover one or more of the following permit/inspection cycles: building (structural), plumbing, mechanical, and electrical. Each permit will require a rough and final inspection from your local city or township municipality. If you have all your renovations performed at once then the process is a lot shorter as you can stack the different inspections efficiently and have less applications and approvals to run past the municipality. If you split up the work then cost can be added because the number of permits and inspections must be multiplied by the number of phases. This adds time for each phase and costs will rise as there is a standard base fee in addition to additional fees based on the cost of the work overall. Time must also be accounted for the meeting with the inspectors, preparing the permits, sending/modifying the application, etc. It is always more efficient and cheaper to bundle tasks together if possible so we recommend doing as few phases of construction as possible to avoid this.

Cohesive Design with Fewer Limitations

One of the trickier tasks that remodelers must succeed at is blending a newly renovated area with the rest of the house. You may have seen projects that less experienced design/build contractors have performed where a freshly remodeled kitchen or bathroom sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the house. The finishes don’t match, the new design motif clashes (e.g. modern bathroom juxtaposed with farmhouse-style living room), and you generally feel a “jolt” going from room to room. If you do a large remodel or tackle the updating the entire house all at one time then it gives our designer a lot more to work with to make your vision come to life. There are always tricks and methods to make sure that your house still feels like home, and our design team will make sure you are getting a beautiful final result no matter the size of your scope(s) of work. But experience has shown us how nice it is for the customer and our staff to be able to work together on a cohesive canvas to ensure that everyone is satisfied with their remodel.

Less Expense on General Conditions

General conditions exist for every construction project, large or small. If you divide your scopes of work into phases e.g. common bathroom first, then the master suite, then the kitchen, you will multiply the general conditions and set up time for a given project. We already covered one in our discussion on permits and inspections above, but there are quite a few more general items that must happen for a successful remodel. Some common items on-site are the dumpster and debris disposal, set up and tear down of the site protection products like floor protection, dust control vacuums and mitigation systems, and site cleaning/final clean up of the job site. You must also consider the office and administrative time that goes into setting up a job – permits, inspection meetings, design time, material ordering, scheduling of trades, the list goes on. Any time you can combine these general condition costs into more efficient groups then you will see the bottom-line costs to you decrease.

Faster Overall Project Completion Time

There are a couple of ways that combining project scopes into one substantial whole-house remodel will make the overall time to project completion drop significantly. For one, our individual tradesmen’s scopes of work become a lot more efficient and less expensive the more they do. Tasks like drywalling and painting are based on economies of scale – the more there is to hang the cheaper the cost per square foot is. They must account for the same conditions as general contractors do and consider how many trips they need to make, how much material to buy, and how much time it will take their crews. An electrician doesn’t care if he is installing one light or twelve, he still has to order the material and send his team out to get the job done.

The trades that need to modify and expand house-wide support systems like your heating and cooling or plumbing can do their job a lot more effectively if they have the entire scope ready for them at one time. Think about an item like your electrical panel: it may need modification or even a new, expanded unit to handle the enhanced work load due to a remodel or addition. If they can do that at once instead of piecemeal it will make it easier to just take care of it ahead of time in anticipation of the new layout. If the HVAC team needs to modify the ducting to a new bathroom, then cap the ducting and wait for the next phase of the addition to start, then it will be less efficient than doing it all in one trip.

Less Disruption of Your Day-to-Day Life

The overall project is done faster and less disruptively when you perform the entire house at once because there are no “pauses” in the project between phases. If you do your bathroom, pause for a few months before starting the kitchen, and then pause again for a few months before starting the master suite then it can feel like your house has been under construction for an entire year. And at that point is has been! One reason clients love R. L. Rider’s process and team is because we can offer you expert advice and help make your experience as fun as possible. We have seen in the past when clients divide up their scopes they can start to get “remodeling fatigue” as you get tired of living on a job site with your life being disrupted with construction. The more you can minimize that by combining phases, the better.

When Should You Renovate Your Whole House at Once?

Remodeling is always at least a little messy and time-consuming, but R. L. Rider Remodeling makes it fun and exciting to get the home of your dreams. Since we have helped so many homeowners in Lansing and the surrounding areas over the years (since 1924!), we feel confident when we advise our clients on the best course of action for their needs. The first advice we always give when a project’s scope keeps on growing is to look for another home to move to. We never suggest or recommend a huge undertaking if the client would be better served by moving into a different house that meets their family’s needs. If you absolutely love a house (maybe you are tied to the area/schools, it has sentimental value, or it is a beautiful historical home) and want to remodel large portions of then we have the team to help you! Any time you have more than one scope of work to perform we recommend you have it completed all at one time under the umbrella of a single project for the reasons listed above.