How do I avoid going over budget on a remodel?
The easiest answer is that there is only one way, and it is by having a good plan. When I say that, people sometimes assume I mean a set of construction drawings. I mean it in the simplest terms. Like anything else in life, a good plan usually produces a better output than you would have had without one.
Many builders and remodelers are stuck in the traditional methodology of being one of two or three other quotes, where the only way to win is to be the lowest number. We have been on a mission for the last 20 years to change people's mentality around that extremely flawed theory, because it is a real race to the bottom. Contractors pitted against each other this way believe it is the only way to survive. Some homeowners enjoy the process of beating those guys into submission to get them in the door — and then the contractor spends the entire project trying to make up the dollars that were lost in the lack of planning and the undershooting of everything required to get the number where they thought the client wanted it before the contract was signed.
Solving that requires two parties on the same page. Both have to understand that the best relationships are the ones where both people are working toward a common goal, and the common goal is to produce a plan that produces a number that is real and has a low likelihood of changing. You plan for schedule. You plan for materials. You plan for specifications. You work together to make sure everything is written down, everything is specified and everything is drawn before the project actually starts.
I have been in business for myself for 20 years, and worked nearly a decade before that in construction — industrial, commercial, residential tracts, custom homes. I have seen a lot of projects across a lot of different industries and been involved in a lot of them, and I can tell you with certainty that residential construction and residential remodeling is probably the only one of these construction industries that still latches on to this mentality: either the entire lack of a plan altogether, or extremely vague descriptions of the scope of the project and the materials being used. Which means the problems get solved in the middle of the construction project, rather than any attempt to solve them before it.
What pre-construction actually means
If you want to avoid going over budget, the one way is pre-construction, or something that resembles it:
Your plans are complete.
Your materials and specifications are chosen.
You have an extremely thorough written scope of work.
Those three documents should all jive. They should complement and recognize each other, and there should be no place where they conflict. On top of that, you really should have a construction schedule, and it should also jive with the other three.
Without those things in place, there is no way to assume you can stay on budget. Every problem solved during construction that could have been solved before construction is likely to cost more than it would have cost to make the modification on paper, while everybody was still in the planning phase.
If the builders near you don't offer it
Finding builders with real pre-construction processes is more difficult than finding anybody who can build, so you may have to do some research in your area. That said, if you are in a smaller community where there are not many builders, or the ones around you are the more traditional type, that does not mean you cannot offer a builder the opportunity to work with you in a pre-construction capacity. It might sound strange to a contractor at first, but I cannot imagine that if you approached a builder with a good plan for pre-construction and offered to pay for regular meetings to help you organize and build the documents above, that person would say no.
The main reason contractors and builders don't offer pre-construction services is that many of them are simply not used to it. Some have never even heard of it. Most don't know how to sell themselves and their own expertise with the confidence to explain to their clients that it works, and that it is truly the only way to stay on time and on budget.
Don't let impatience set the pace
Being anxious to get something done can take away from the plan. Don't let your own impatience force everyone to work through this process faster than it needed to be, because that is often how details slide or get missed.
Bottom line: find somebody with a process, get everything picked before you start construction, have the entire thing mapped out on paper, and make sure that you and your builder are truly on the same page and communicating well. That is what it is going to take to stay on budget.
