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How long will my remodel take?

26 min read TL;DR: Your remodel will probably take longer than you hoped, but you can shorten the timeline of the actual work by investing your time in solid planning!

sketch of mid-century living room with built-in shelving, angled ceiling and full height masonry fireplace.

One of the questions I get asked most often (right after how much will my remodel cost) is, hey, how long will my remodel take?

We all want a solid answer to this question before moving forward. But the reality is how long it all takes depends on how much of your house is affected, who does the work, when it starts and HOW DECISIVE YOU ARE ALONG THE WAY!

So … the answer is it depends.

But I’ve got good news for you as well as bad news, here. Because it depends on some factors you can predict and sometimes factors you can control with your own choices!

TL;DR: Your remodel will probably take longer than you hoped, but you can shorten the timeline of the actual work by investing your time in solid planning!

First, a caveat:

Pick from “fast, cheap, or good.”

Any discussion of how long it will take to remodel is best considered in the infinitely valuable metaphor of the Venn diagram of three circles labeled fast, cheap and good.

You may only pick two. 

Venn diagram of three circles, labeled: fast, cheap, and good. Annotated: "you may pick two." This is as true of design as it is of the question "how long will my remodel take." Choose wisely.

Now this is true of a lot of things in life.

And it’s true of both design and construction (to a certain extent). Money can pay for speed. But, pouring money into a well-designed, gorgeous project may not result in a quick build. Sometimes quality just takes longer.

Certainly most projects can happen faster with more dollars and more attention attached. And, as a general rule, there are three levels of attention your project can get depending on the type of remodeling organization you choose. 

If you want your remodel done well and cheaply, it will be slow.

This might be how you would make it happen if you do it yourself or self manage the project. You may be able to get changes made to your home relatively cheaply and quickly, but you’re unlikely to get the quality of materials and workmanship that you’d like.

A more speedy and yet expensive option might mean working with a high end remodeling firm with experience in mid-century homes, but that certainly won’t be cheap. 

The bad news

The short version of how long will the remodel take?

It’s going to take longer than you hoped, longer than you plan for, and longer than you expected. 

I definitely never recommend anyone to try to remodel before a hard stop date, a move in date, or certainly before a major life events like a wedding or a baby. It might seem like a good idea to make changes before you get to that point in your life, but if you plan a remodel against a hard deadline, it is going to add stress and turmoil to life.

You’d like to have preference drive your remodel speed rather than necessity. 

Best “Estimates” of how long your remodel will take

Generally, you can expect a whole house remodel to take between four and nine months, possibly longer. 

Remodels of mid-century (and older homes) always have a few unexpected delays due to discovered-in-process factors like odd structure, hidden maintenance problems and (sometimes) new design opportunities.

Timelines for smaller area remodels depend more on their complexity than their size.

A kitchen remodel is going to probably take the most time. But smaller areas that have less moving parts like bathrooms can still take as much as 12 weeks, even with a full service contract. 

Some of the quickest and most logistically simple remodels are finished basement projects AND you can often live in the house while the work happens.

The good news:

Your choices affect how long it will all take!

Here are several levers you can pull that can affect the timing of your remodel: 

  • The type of contractor you choose.
  • The season you start.
  • Understanding and responding to what’s going on in the economy and supply chains. 
  • How much you have considered the details before the work begins. 
  • And how clearly you’ve communicated your expectations to the person (or people) doing the work for you.

Some factors you’ll have more or less control over. You can’t control the weather, especially is you choose to try to work in a shoulder season. After you’ve set the plans in motion, human factors will happen. There may be supply delays. 

But you can control those last two levers quite well.  And the best thing you can do for your remodeling outcome is to plan thoroughly, and then do a great job of communicating that plan.  

Ideally, what you want to do is plan slowly and execute quickly.

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • All about the remodel schedule venn diagram. 
  • Where it is easiest to exert some control over your remodel timeline. 
  • How to get ready to create the remodel schedule you want for your project.

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

One of the questions I get asked most often, right after how much will my remodel cost is, hey, how long will the remodel take? And the answer is, Oh, my dear friend. The answer is it depends. But it depends on some factors we can predict, and sometimes factors we can control for.

So today we’re going to talk about the various choices that affect the speed of your remodel, and why you might or might not want to make them. The bottom line though, for us mid mod remodelers is that we’re making long term choices, how long you and the next generations of people will live in and love your home once it’s all polished up will be much longer than the time it takes to remodel. So hang on to that good thought.

And let’s go. Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1701.

So we’re kicking off a new season here. And this one is going to be all about answering your questions. I get so many questions coming at me all the time from my friends and followers on Instagram and on Facebook, from the students inside the ready to remodel programs from my clients and from people I just chat with out and about.

And many of them have overlapping qualities or core questions that feel like things everybody wants to know, but is sometimes afraid to ask. So I thought I would use all of these questions as the framework for this season of the mid modern model Podcast.

Today, I’m answering the question that I get asked just constantly by just about everyone I ever speak to about mid-century updates, how long will the remodel take? But over the course of the season? I’m going to answer questions I get by email or in our FAQ survey form. So if you have a question about updating and upgrading your mid-century home, that I’ve never answered for you properly, I would love to hear it.

And I have some of the next episodes blocked out, but I do not have the whole 13 Season Episodes scoped yet. So head over to the show notes page and find the survey right there. Asked me your question, I might very well find it so compelling that it becomes the next episode of the podcast over the next couple of months.

If you’ve got questions that need following up, or more information that’s really specific to your house, well, then maybe we should just chat about it. And as always, the most immediate way you can get design help from me, or from Midwest is to set up a design SOS consultation call, you can just go right ahead and schedule one into any available time slot on my schedule using the link on my website.

You can do that at mid mod dash midwest.com/call. So pick the time over the next couple of weeks when you want to get feedback on your most pressing big picture questions. I guess that’s I’ll say the resource of the week this week is me. Call up and let’s chat on Zoom about what’s going on with your house. You can pop into my schedule anytime you need advice, support, encouragement, or just some help to figure out the next step to make great choices for your house.

So any discussion of how long will the remodel take is best considered in the infinitely valuable metaphor or the Venn diagram of three circles labeled fast, cheap and good. Of course, you may only pick two. Now this is true of a lot of things in life. It’s certainly true of design. And it’s true of construction as well to a certain extent, although not entirely while money can pay for speed, pouring money into a highly designed gorgeous project may still not happen as fast as some other projects. Sometimes quality just takes longer.

But certainly it can happen faster than the alternative with more dollars. As a general rule, we can think of the three different types of remodeling organizational structures you can choose, it works like this, if you want your remodel done well and cheaply, it will be slow. This might be how you would make it happen if you do it yourself or self manage the project hiring subcontractors with needed giving them permission to do things like prioritize your project less slipping in between one or two of their larger things so that they can fit it in with their schedule that can help them decrease the price.

If you want to search for salvage materials or buy things on sale and stock them up, this will slow down the process but help it happen more cheaply. And of course, DIY doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. I wish it did I wish slow DIY meant a guaranteed work of art at the end. But you know that depends on your DIY skills, or mine by you. I mean one and by one I mean me.

But the results can be a very good outcome relatively inexpensively very inexpensively. And it’s also one of the slowest possible ways to make things happen. Because you’re slipping your work in amongst the other responsibilities of your adult life working, socializing, recreating sleeping, parenting, perhaps Perhaps being a member of a partnership being a member of society. I should also point out this is a case where the cheapness of the project is somewhat the unaccounted value of your own time, but that’s another topic. We’ll leave it there.

Anyway, you can get the changes done to your home relatively cheaply and quickly. But they won’t be good. For example, it’s astonishing how fast old growth pine spruce Redwood cedar siding can be torn off of a house and replaced with vinyl. It can be done in a trice or a week, probably, to transition of an 70 year old, irreplaceable, original hardwood siding into the landfill. And brand new forever plastic on the side of a house can happen in your neighborhood while you’re away for a long weekend, won’t you be horrified when you get back?

And I’m not saying that anything pre planned and pre manufactured, ready for install is a bad thing. But in general, I, I cringe at the idea of fast and cheap as a chosen pairing for anything on a mid-century house. Because you’re probably choosing to replace something original irreplaceable, perhaps on the house was something that will need replacement again and again, in not too long when people come in and tear out hardwood floors to put in walls wall carpet ill considered or when they come in and put in that HGTV standard, the LVT, the so called luxury vinyl tile, could someone show me where the luxury is it’s vinyl tile. Anyway, I’ll rant about that another time.

These choices are not going to wear well performance wise or style wise, they’re going to need to be replaced over and over. So the speed and the cheapness of the construction lacks in good and actually means it’s going to be expensive and take more time again later.

There’s the third variation on fast, cheap, good, which is good and fast but not cheap. This might not be the fastest possible because again, some things done really well. No amount of money is going to make them happen super fast. But putting more money into a project can speed it up. What’s the point of all this philosophizing, basically, to set your expectations that this will take longer than you hope it will.

And we should also before I say numbers to you discuss what we mean by how long will the remodel take, how long the remodel takes, really depends on when you start the clock, the length of construction in your mind might be the time when you need to move out of a space to when you can move back in. Or if you’re living in the house. Partly while remodeling is happening, how long a certain part of the house is out of commission. It could also in your head, how long does the remodel take could be the length of time from when you first shake hands with a contractor you decide you like to when you shake hands for the last time and tell them great job.

That’s a much longer range to talk about. There are a lot of waiting times getting on someone’s calendar is not the same thing as getting into way. And let me think about how long will the remodel take a good contractor will actually hold off on breaking ground or demolition until they feel like they’ve got as many of the decisions locked down as possible. And they have a good sense of control of the factors that will go into construction timing, access to the necessary materials, those materials being very thoroughly decided on confidence that their team is ready to leap into action and move forward. These are all signs of actually a good process even if they seem like they’re delaying the process start to you.

So if we’re gonna say numbers out loud, how long will the remodel take also depends on how much of the house we remodel. A whole house remodel, where every part of the house in and perhaps also out will be affected will ultimately be more efficient in some ways than a piecemeal set of projects done over a series of years.

It’s also in some ways going to be more efficient, then the kind of project where you move out of part of the house and camp and the rest of it. If you’re clearly out of the space, and the contractors can move around time their teams and start and finish times move materials work as early as late as needed. There are some economies of scale there that can be helpful. And you can expect a whole house remodel like that to take I would say at least four months, easily up to nine months and very possibly longer. If that sounds crazy.

Let’s break it down a little. Let’s talk about kitchens. I would bet that any project that takes on the whole house includes a kitchen remodel. Even just for a kitchen remodel, we’re still talking about a couple of months at the very least and that’s just drywall does to time. When we talk about how long will the remodel take. Even with a design in mind, you can count on needing several months of communication and planning time with your builder in order to get all the i’s dotted and all the T’s crossed.

A good contractor will want to scope out the project thoroughly and have everything completely thought through before they begin on demolition, which makes the most of that drywall dust time. There’ll be a week or two of demolition, another week or two of rough ends. That means making the structural changes necessary new door and window openings placing the plumbing the electrical elements H back that’s heating ventilating.

That’s heating ventilation air conditioning units where they need to be and insulating any exterior walls most mid-century remodels if you touch an exterior wall you get the chance to add insulation because there’s not enough and then getting that work inspected.

Inspections typically also take time they often happen the same day when tasks get finished up the sub will call an inspector look over that particular type of work when they finish it. But sometimes it finished too late and A day to get the inspector and that can cause a day or more of delay. Sometimes the inspector notes something to be corrected. And that will also cause delay.

All of these approvals need to be locked up before the drywall can go in, and the finished work can begin. So even when all the ducks are lined up neatly in a row, this can still take a month, everything needs to arrive on time and be installed in the right order. So one small hang up can pause the finish work on the entire project, the tile is unavailable, there’s a slowdown in the cabinet shop.

All told, I would be shocked if a kitchen remodel could be completed in much under three months. Unless it was fairly cosmetic. This time, actually out of commission might be shorter. So if you’re living in the house camping and a basement utility sinks, temporary kitchen, you might be able to get into the kitchen and do a little light cooking before all the final details are squared away as long as your contractor doesn’t object.

But that how long will the remodel take question is something you want to clarify with your builder, what their thoughts are on when the remodel begins and ends and how much you can be involved in that space at the time. One thing that’s going to affect if we’re talking about kitchens again, one thing that particularly will affect how long the remodel takes is are you replacing in place or moving things around?

A so called replacement remodel is one where you just take out the existing cabinets, appliances and finishes and install new things in their places. This can prove practical if timeline is your biggest question. Or if you actually like the layout of your kitchen a lot right now, but it’s in poor repair. It’s rarely the right option. For us though, it’s rarely the right option for mid-century homeowners because our biggest challenge is as you’re probably aware of the layout of the kitchen.

And even if the kitchen isn’t original to the house, we often have the double problem of you’ve got the new old 1980s era cabinets that don’t look as mid-century as you want them to and are worn out. And they’re done in the exact arrangement of the original kitchen with very mid-century vintage philosophy of how a kitchen should work how many homemakers it should fit in one, and whether the rest of the family should be visually blocked from it. So it’s often the worst of both worlds.

That’s because the previous owner opted for an easy replacement kitchen remodel. And that’s not usually what I recommend for you. If you’re going to go to the time and trouble of a kitchen remodel, you might as well make it work for your family too. That said, there are some steps we can take with design to simplify the layout changes and shorten the remodeling timeline. In many kitchen remodels that I help my clients and students plan. Even when we move other elements around we keep the kitchen sink in its exact location.

Now of course we could choose to move it but keeping the sink anchored prevents us from having to worry about how plumbing lines will line up with the window. And with elements below in the basement. And just sort of simplifies the possibilities, we often find that the kitchen sink isn’t in a bad place, it’s just that we need more circulation space more counter space for visual through lines.

So keeping the plumbing, perhaps a gas line if you’re sticking with a gas stove, although you could switch to induction and then it’s easier to move the stove range oven combination and keeping the sink where it is can minimize the amount of disruption that’s necessary to go beyond a replacement remodel. So all right, then we go beyond the kitchen. If you are moving spaces or adding on the remodel will take longer.

One of the best ways to slow down a remodel is to change more than the footprint of the existing space. And again, this is often worthwhile. But when you’re asking how long does the remodel take. If we’re talking about moving an existing kitchen to a new part of the house, moving a kitchen to a bump out an actual addition of the house, any addition to the footprint of the house, or even just borrowing space from one part of the house to another for kitchens or for other plumbed spaces. It’ll slow it down.

Anytime we’re moving walls or adding walls. Anytime we’re expanding the footprint new footings new roof new walls, were slowing down the remodel. And this is not me telling you you should not do any of those things. In some cases, I think it’s absolutely essential to think outside of the box, the existing walls of your house. And the way places are located within your house right now in order to make the best, most tailored choices for your family and how your house is turning into your home. But you do need to weigh the pros and cons.

And it’s good to just acknowledge when you’ve made a choice that’s ultimately going to make your house so much better, so much more appropriate for you. It may also take a little longer to get you there. When we’re breaking down them. How long will it take? How long will the remodel take into more subcomponents.

People often assume that a bathroom is small so it will go quickly. But if you think about it, a bathroom while much smaller than a kitchen is not that much less complicated than a kitchen. So you can expect a bathroom where everything is being replaced and perhaps partially relocated, especially if we’re borrowing spaces or moving any walls to take up to two months, maybe more. In some ways being smaller means It has even more layered, careful needs for personnel.

Each step needs to happen in order. Of course, you can’t put down a countertop without a cabinet and tile needs to come in exactly the right spot. And because the space is small, no more than two people more likely one can ever be moving it forward at once. Ironically, finishing a basement is one of the fastest projects that when people ask how long will the remodel take, I can say your basement might also be a two month project, depending on who does it.

And that’s because generally speaking, you’re not subtracting, there’s not a lot to remove, and there aren’t as many surprises possible. You can frame a new walls, insulate wire and plumb more simply because you can see everything that’s happening. And as an added benefit, it’s often possible to work on a basement project while you live in the house. Great news.

That saves you the trouble of having to move out and be in another space and be away from the project. Now granted, it’s not the easiest, quietest, or least dusty life you can lead. But that makes the project feel like it’s moving forward when you see the progress happening. Okay, let’s talk about what you can do the choices you can make that affect how long will the remodel take. One of the first choices, the most important choices you can make is what type of contractor you choose.

Beyond the design choices, as I talked about up at the top, choosing to DIY, or even to partially DIY remodel, is one of the slowest possible ways. That doesn’t mean it’s worse. And it probably is also less expensive. You can probably live in the house the entire time. But there’s something to be said for the rip the band aid off philosophy, just get it done.

I know there are a lot of arguments in favor of do it yourself remodels, it’s a thing that I like to do. You can save money, you can make it your hobby, you can amuse yourself by figuring out how to things do things you’ve never done before improve the skills you’ve got.

And you know what you like to do. So it can be really fun to turn around when the project is done to point at something in your house and say I did that I thought it through I planned it, I got the permits. I did the work it was approved, and now it makes my life better every day. It’s full circle satisfaction. But if you want to get your remodel done more quickly, the best way is to give that job to someone whose full time job it is not fitted around your regular life.

And still hiring out the work has a bunch of possibilities and variations. The closest to DIY is to self manage your project. So you might even do some of the work. You might hire subcontractors like plumbers, electricians, and drywall hangers to do parts of the work you don’t have time to do or don’t have an interest in doing ever anymore. I will never hang another sheet of drywall in my life. I do know how to do it. It’s just that I just don’t like to do it. And don’t do it quickly. That’s a job for somebody else.

The step up from this is to hire a handyman style contractor who will do some parts of the work themselves and manage subcontractors and people like that for you likely and working with your input, they may encourage you to pitch in where they need help.

This is often a kind of person who has worked for or even owned a larger contracting organization and is now retired or stepped back from full time work for family reasons or out of preference. It can be an amazing powerup to a general DIY remodel. And it’s one of the best ways to really feel comfortable with having changes made to your home, particularly while you live in it. You can find this type of contractor by word of mouth.

And when you find the right person, they can become a friend, they can become another part of your extended family and just a really comfortable person to have popped by on a weekend to drop off supplies and really listen to you. By the way, I have some more discussion of types of contractors and how that feels in the episode 1406. The title of that episode is actually do you need a mid-century contractor? Listen to find out the answer.

But I discussed the different types of contractor scales you’re going to like run into in that episode and it’s a great place to get more. I’ll just finish up a quick overview, different types of contractors and their speed considerations.

So working with a handyman style contractor who comes over when they have time, perhaps between other jobs and other obligations is working by themselves or enlisting your aid for little projects. It’s going to be obviously the next slowest way to do a remodel after DIY.

Still gonna be the perfect way to knock off the little projects. The next step is to work with a custom home builder or remodeler, who has a small organization that works with one or two projects at a time. This type of organization has a general contractor that has relationships with specific subcontractors they like they do really lovely work in most situations crafted to your specifications, and I would expect them to be probably in the middle range in terms of timing.

When everything goes it’s best, they can focus on your house and prioritize getting things done as quickly as possible. But if there’s a hang up, they may be more easily derailed or if they’re working on several small projects at the same time. something going wrong on someone else’s house may cause delays on yours through no fault of your own.

The third type of remodeling team that works well with a mid-century home remodel is the large scale area general contractor. If you happen to be Madison local, this would be the equivalent of Waunakee remodeling. They do great work. They’re generalists who take on projects large and small, they have multiple things going on all at the same time. Often, firms like this grow out of a more specific type of remodeling, I think for Waunakee, they began as a window and door replacement company and then just grew.

Now companies like this have often a long wait time to begin, because they’re good at sort of planning out in advance, but they can be relied on to move pretty quickly once they get started. Because they have multiple teams in motion. They’ve got multiple crews of electricians, have plumbers have framers of hangers. If something goes wrong with any of these groups, they are able to tag someone else and keep the project moving forward.

And because they run a large scale operations and do many projects per season, they’ll be able to estimate and predict their timing more accurately compared to a smaller team that has less data to process. So choosing the right scale of a remodeling company can affect your timing dramatically. Okay, here’s some other things that will affect how long will the remodel take the season, when you start? The earlier the better in the year.

So you’ve got plenty of time to go through and not get affected by weather. But right now it’s April in Wisconsin, we just had a freak snowstorm I had seen some construction crews already at work around and I was feeling really bad for them when they all got an unexpected dump of snow and extra moisture. But if you start too late in the year, you can end up finding yourself paused by reason of weather more predictably. There’s also the economy.

Again, you can’t control this, but you can time the system a little bit you can look for when interest rates are in a particular place when demand is lower, right now, things are better than they have been. And they can still get better. There are infinite human factors, you can’t really control for this other than to choose a larger organization that’s less likely to have one person one manager sick out on you. But you know, even so whoever is in charge of your project could have a personal issue that could slow down your life.

And that is that is working with human people. There has been this little thing called the pandemic, perhaps you’ve heard of it, it caused a crazy confluence of factors to drive up the price and the length, the wait time of an avid remodel sky high. Everyone was stuck at home, working, living playing all in the same space. We couldn’t travel, eat out or spend their disposable income on our usual pleasures.

And we all sort of realized simultaneously that our homes could use improvement. Couple that with the difficulty of coordinating workers broken supply chains, and general health cautions, the whole system went haywire, and we’re still dealing with it. It was not only expensive and slower to remodel them, but it was harder to get the attention of contractors, especially the good ones, people tended to take their first call back and sign a contract and move forward without any bid comparisons, my nightmare.

Now the good news is that a few years on, people are spending less nationally on Home Improvement and that crazy traffic jam of remodeling demand has gone down somewhat. It’s easier to get in contact with good people and the good contractors should have plenty of happy recent clients to refer you to for reviews. There’s not a lot you can do about this factor. But plan early and be ready to strike whenever the market the interest rates, the supply costs and contractor wait times seem optimal to you.

I think that you can do that will control or affect the timeline. How long will the remodel take is planning. Poor planning will slow down any plan. Solid planning absolutely can improve the overall timing of your model. This is the one we control the most dramatically and your responsibility changing your mind. While your remodel is already in your way might result in needing new materials redoing work that’s already been done bringing back in subcontractors who had been completed and Change Order Chaos.

You want to avoid all of this. So work with your contractor carefully before beginning to make sure that you and they understand exactly what’s gonna happen and that you all like it. You can come to your contractor with a fully fleshed out vision there. I call this a mid-century master plan of what you can accomplish, why it’s important to you and what it should look like and more. And this will simplify and speed up your remodel process.

This season I wanted to introduce a new episode feature, the history snippet because I’ve got things about mid-century history I want to tell you and I thought it would kick it off this week with one that’s a little bit aligned with the topic of our greater episode. How long will the remodel take? Let’s talk about how long the remodel or the construction might have taken way back in the day.

And if you just guessed that I’m going to talk to you about Levittown. Yeah, you guessed Right. The construction process that brought Ford’s assembly line theories out of the factory and into literal fields on a massive scale, was described by architectural historian Kenneth Jackson as bulldozing and removing the trees, trucks carefully dropped off building materials at precise 60 foot intervals.

The construction process itself was divided into 27 distinct steps, crews were trained to do one job. On the day the white paint men would come and then the red paint men would come and then the tile layers. This process began with laying the foundation and ended with a clean sweep of a new home. And the leather teams used factory ideas in the field.

And they also created central factory areas where they could put together the more complicated pieces like built ins and concentrate their skilled labor in those spots. In the Levittown, New York, the assembly line production reached a productivity level of 30 houses constructed every day. Now, the level plans were very basic. They were not as charming later ones got into the ranch style. But the first ones were just like really basic, most simple possible program or what the house is supposed to do to fit the smallest possible exterior envelope.

The plumbing core was concentrated with bathrooms right next to the kitchen to reduce and the kitchen at the front of the house to reduce the length of piping to the street. He later said that this was about getting mom’s eyes on the street to watch program but let’s just be real. This was about cost cutting. That said William will have it liked to influence his control not just over his workers, but over every part of the houses. You know, Frank Lloyd Wright famously once designed to dress for the household wife to wear and match the house.

But William Levitt was also trying to really influence the lifestyle of the people in the neighborhoods he created. His houses came with an owner’s manual that included rules about how high the border shrubbery could be fences were prohibited the colors of the houses the days on which washing could be hung out and the allowable quantity of pets. Apparently people really followed these rules in the early years and then they figured out there was no way to enforce them.

Love it or leave it. There’s no question that the love it. Design had a huge influence on the idea of American suburban housing. But here’s a fun fact I want you to remember for when this ever comes up in conversation, William love it was not the inventor of the idea of prefabrication or quickly produced mass housing. His first lead Town project on Long Island was done in 1970 1947. But right here in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Eagan Park neighborhood Coolidge Street is a development of 40 houses that was kicked off in 1942 by Illinois developer John Tilton.

And those houses had lumber pre cut to length and use an assembly line process. They are also a sort of classic minimalist traditionalist Cape Cod style with a living room and a larger bedroom in front Kitchen and Bath and smaller bedroom along the back storage or open attic space above. But they were able to put up a group of houses in just under a month. Not too bad.

And there’s talk about listing that area on as a national landmark because it did it came before Levittown. So take that William Levit.

All right, carrying on into our main topic. If you want to know more about maybe some pictures of Levittown, maybe some pictures of ikan Park, I’ll see what I can dig up before this episode goes live. And any other resources I’m going to mention today, you will find them at the show notes page mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1701. Let’s get into it.

So let’s recap. The short version of how long will the remodel take is that’s going to take longer than you hoped longer than your plan for longer than you expected. It’s kind of similar to how much it’s going to cost plan for some overage here.

I definitely never recommend anyone to try to remodel before a hard stop date, a move in date, or certainly before a major life events like a wedding or a baby. It might seem like a good idea to make changes before you get to that point in your life.

But if you plan a remodel against a hard deadline, it is going to add stress and turmoil to life. You’d like to have preference rather than necessity be the driver of a quick remodel. Generally, you can expect a whole house remodel comprehensively to take between four and nine months possibly longer. Smaller area remodels depending on their complexity, more than their size, a kitchen remodel is going to probably take the most time.

Remodels of smaller areas that have less moving parts like bathrooms can still take as much as 12 weeks, even with a full service contract. Now there are several levers you can pull that can affect the timing of your remodel, the type of contractor you choose the season you start, what’s going on in the economy, how dialed Are you are into every detail before the work begins and how clearly you’ve communicated your expectations to the person or people who are doing the work for you all affect this.

And then there’s a number of factors. You can’t control the weather and the season. Things that will begin after you’ve set the plans in motion human factors involved supply delays. But the bottom line is the best thing you can do for your remodeling outcome one that costs See, the least takes the least time. And turns out in the long run, and the way you love most is to plan. So let’s roll right into our wrap up pep talk. This is going to feel deeply related to the episode today, and a song I have sung to you many times before my friends, the sooner you begin, the better.

I think the philosophy we all want to take around. How long will the remodel take is we want the planning part to take as long as it needs so that the remodel itself can happen as quickly as possible. The way to make planning ahead, feel nicer is not to do it in a rush. What you want to do ideally is plan slowly and execute quickly. You want to mull it over, think your desires through interrogate your own emotions.

Ask yourself how you feel about your home right now check in with your partner and get on the same page, do all of this emotional legwork upfront, and translate that into clearer preferences, priorities and a final style aesthetic, we can talk about whether you need to figure out your layout choices, and fully plan the entire remodel out on your own. I would argue you can.

But you don’t have to. If you move into talking to contractors, before you know some of those things, you can get some great advice from them. They can give you their experience on good layout solutions for your kitchen. If it’s too closed off, or the fact that your front room doesn’t feel private enough from the street, they provide good advice based on previous projects. You don’t have to have everything worked out before you start speaking to contractors or designers. But you will be able to work more effectively more quickly if you have done your foundational remodel thinking your remodel one on one, that what matters most to you.

First, you want to know what are your priorities. And what do you want your remodel to look like. And you want to feel very competent about those two things, and what’s good for your house. Then everything else runs on rails. It is so much more effective than if you waffle or change your mind, or realize things about your preferences only after the process has been set in motion. Again, I don’t think this is gonna seem surprising to you when I say ideally, you want to spend more time planning than you do in executing.

And ultimately, the final result, the way it turns out is much more important, and how long it takes to make it happen. You want to be delighted with the outcome. You want to feel like your house has become even more you’re home, and that you’ve invested your time and your money, no matter how much wisely for your own needs and preferences. All of that comes from a foundation, the early stages of planning those foundational steps of asking yourself what kind of home you want to live in, and knowing what your house needs right now in order to become the home for you aesthetically and functionally. So what’s the to do out of this pep talk?

Now’s the time, start having some conversations with the people in your life. The people who share your house with you, or even your friends and family. Ask them what they think home means to you. Sometimes it’s interesting to get that reflection. Begin thinking about what it feels like when you visit your friends’ houses. Are they more or less homey than yours? All of the thinking can help you prepare for a remodel that will go faster.

So when you ask how long will the remodel take? I can say some of that depends on you. All right, my friend find the transcript for this episode and links to the resources I mentioned in the show notes page. That’s mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1701. And next week on the podcast, I’m answering the question that came up today. One A lot of people asked me what is the right flooring for a mid-century update. And should you go with that luxury vinyl tile that everyone keeps talking about? Tune in next week to find out!

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