Clients often ask us where they should start when planning a bathroom remodel or kitchen renovation. Should they start with calling a contractor? Budgeting the project? For many people, not knowing where to start is very confusing, frustrating, and potentially expensive.
Just what are the key steps to planning a home renovation project? The following five step plan should simplify the process and save you money, time, and hassle. Let’s hit these real fast, one at a time.
1. Scope Planning
The first thing you should do is plan the scope of your project. You need to know what you want to accomplish in the target area.
Let’s think about renovating a bathroom, for example. You need to know if you want a total bathroom remodel or only a partial renovation. Write everything out on paper.
This is called your scope of work.
Whatever you want done at the end of the day is your scope of work. Make two scopes: on the high side, put down everything you want done in a perfect scenario, and on the low side, put down your Plan B in case Plan A exceeds your budget.
Perhaps in a perfect world, you’re tearing out the bathtub, vanity, etc. for a complete remodel of your bathroom. Write all that down. But on the low side, figure the minimum you would be happy accomplishing. Maybe replacing the tile and painting the walls would suffice.
Then list a store item number for each item you want to replace your current bathroom elements. For example, include the paint color number, the item number for that bathtub you really like. Get this all down on paper.
Remember, your contractor isn’t hired to shop for you. If he does your shopping, it’s going to be a lot more expensive for taking up unnecessary time. At the end of the day, this is your project, and you should put down exactly what you want your contractor to replace your current items with.
Now, if you don’t know what you want, ask your contractor. Contractors are happy to make recommendations and inform you of your options. They can recommend colors, styles, fixtures, etc. to help you understand what your options are.
2. Pricing
Next, present your two scopes (the high scope and low scope) to your contractor or contractors if you haven’t yet chosen a specific contractor. Show them what you ideally want versus the minimum you would find acceptable. Getting a few quotes on each of these scenarios will give you an accurate sense of the market pricing for your two scenarios.
When your contractors come back with pricing, make sure it’s not just a vague, verbal number. Get specific numbers for specific scopes in writing. Ideally, it should be your scope for their price written down. Get this settled before you ever assign your job to a contractor.
If your high scope is too high for your budget, figure out what you can eliminate. Maybe you don’t have to go straight to your low scope. Make adjustments until your scope is in budget. Find the balance between what you want out of a remodel and paying a fair price.
3. Qualifying
Before you settle on a contractor, qualify them. Call their references. Ask questions.
Are they the type to start a job and then not show up again?
Are they known for quality work?
Do they communicate clearly and in a friendly manner?
Will they finish in a timely manner?
Are they the kind of contractor who always finds extra expenses to charge you for?
Remember, contractors aren’t necessarily bad just because they’re inexpensive. And contractors aren’t necessarily good just because they’re expensive.There are a lot of affordable professionals who really know what they’re doing, while many expensive contractors don’t have a clue. Many times, the middle of the road is the safe zone.
Do all of your homework before giving them the job. You can only afford to do this once, which means you can only afford to do it right. It’s much better to want a contractor you don’t have than to have a contractor you don’t want.
4. Scheduling
After you have selected a quality contractor who works wells with you and your needs, discuss scheduling.
And this doesn’t just mean settling on a start date.
You should nail down the start date, the finish date, any absences in between, etc. How long will it take them to complete the renovation project? Will your job sit idle for a while? You need to know this so you can either schedule work during those down times or, if you live there, so you can schedule your life around this timeline.
This works both ways. Your contractor needs to know when you will be there. Sometimes, we get to a job first thing in the morning only to find they aren’t ready for us until 10am. Contractors typically count on full work days, so putting them off a couple hours completely throws off their process and costs them money.
Communicate scheduling clearly, and understand the timeline clearly. If there are any events or scheduling problems foreseeable, mention them in advance.
What about unforeseen emergencies? Communicate to your contractor as soon and clearly as possible. Be courteous to your contractors and expect them to be courteous to you.
Once your schedule is nailed down, stick with it. This may mean cancelling social activities. Along with your scope, the schedule is the most important factor in the renovation planning process. Move everything else to accommodate the project. Keep with it.
5. Executing
Once the first four steps have been addressed, wait patiently for the job to begin. And make sure you handle whatever you are supposed to do for your contractor.
If you have agreed to pick up materials or provide an on-site bathroom or just keeping a clear work area so they can move freely, execute faithfully. Your contractors count on you to make the partnership work successfully.
Whatever you said you would do to ensure a smooth workflow for your contractor, do it. And then, once they arrive, review the scope and expectations with them so everything is fresh in the mind and everyone is on the same page.
Then, get out of the way, and let them work. Trust your contractor and your plan, and watch that renovation plan become a reality!
Clients often ask if it would be more expensive to replace cabinets than to just paint them. It depends on how you look at it. Let’s break down the costs of each and explain the different expectations involved.
Can I Just Paint Them, Myself?
First, if you are planning on painting them, yourself, consider this. Most people think of themselves as a decent painter. But the truth is your custom cabinets are high visibility and considered finish carpentry. If you don’t do this for a living, chances are it won’t look quite right. There are many considerations the average homeowner with a paint brush isn’t exactly expert on that a professional on the other hand will have mastered. These include, among others:
Material Bonding
Adhesives (oil-based vs. water based)
Laquers
Experienced painting professionals understand just what your cabinets needs and how to properly apply these coatings.
Which Is Less Expensive?
Painting Next, what is involved in hiring a professional to paint your cabinets? What is the process? A professional painter will come in and prep the site, paint the cabinets, and clean up. It typically takes no more than a week from start to finish.
Replacing
On the other hand, replacing cabinets is a much more involved process. You must hire a custom carpenter to prep the job site, demolish the old cabinets (including the old countertop, electrical wiring, etc.), custom build new cabinets that will fit your old space (to accommodate your existing floors), paint these new cabinets, prep the sheetrock and touchup the job site. The process typically takes 2-4 weeks.
Long-Term Perspective
So obviously, replacing your kitchen cabinets is far more expensive than merely re-painting them. Right? Yes, and no.
While replacing your cabinets is more expensive up front, what is your objective? Do you really like your cabinets? Are they in excellent shape? Then save money, and paint them. But get a professional, because you can’t just touchup a paint job on cabinets.
But what if you don’t really like your cabinets? What if they’re old and don’t have many more years on them? What if they don’t suit your current needs? Then why paint them to save a few bucks up front when you’re going to be replacing them in a couple years anyway?
In the short term, yes, painting is cheaper. But in the long-term perspective, get the cabinets you need. Don’t throw away money on touchup jobs and quick fixes.
When framing an addition or deck attached to your home, one small mistake can lead to big headaches and expensive damage.
We recently replaced a set of exterior stairs, and in the process of removing the old to put on the new, we discovered something that will cost the homeowners more than they bargained for! Where the old stairs were anchored to the siding of the house at the landing, the previous builders failed to nail their rim joists into the back joist. Instead, they nailed it directly into the wall of the house.
You might think just a few nails into your siding wouldn’t compromise your house that much (it’s ok, many framers think the same thing). But the reality is these nail holes allow water to collect in the wall, causing catastrophic failure in a relatively short period of time. As you can see in the video below, the result was total rot of the siding, sheathing, and studs.
All told, the total extra project cost to the homeowners for putting just a few nails in the wrong place: a couple grand.
When attaching anything to your home – whether stairs, a deck, or whatever – choose a framing contractor who puts quality over profits. Get a builder with good reviews online and who knows not to take costly shortcuts like this. Do it right the first time.
Whenever you stain raw wood, it’s important to varnish or seal it before use. Otherwise, the stain could absorb oils and grime from use, and you might ruin that stained surface. Let’s look at the proper way to varnish a stained surface. Here are your steps.
1. Apply in a moderate climate.
When you stain or varnish, make sure you have an even climate. Make sure you are not applying in a spot with part shade and part sun. Otherwise, it will dry unevenly, and you don’t want that.
Also, it’s important if it’s really warm outside, not to apply in direct sunlight. Otherwise, your varnish (or stain) will dry too quickly. You want to apply in temperature that is moderate so that it doesn’t heat up too fast and dry uneven. Go for all shaded or full sun in the evening or cool temperature.
2. Load brush with a conservative amount of varnish.
Load up your brush with a conservative amount of varnish. Dip it a couple times and strain it out. Repeat. Now we’re ready to apply.
3. Apply on a flat surface first.
Just like with applying stain, start with a large flat surface. We’re varnishing a newel rod, so we will start on the flat surfaces near the top and bottom. Spread it until the brush is almost empty.
Make sure you go with the grain of the wood if at all possible. So get all the varnish out of the brush with broad strokes on a flat surface before moving on.
4. Work hard-to-get areas before reloading.
After getting most of the varnish out of the brush, work in the hard-to-get areas. The reason we do this last is because varnish runs very easily.
5. Repeat the process until the whole surface is covered.
Reload your brush again and hit a broad, flat surface again to work out the majority of your varnish in the brush. Then hit those nooks and crannies again until your item is covered.
It’s difficult to go with the grain when you’re working in the little grooves. So you obviously need to work it in however you can and then feather it out in broad strokes so it doesn’t have any runs or any varnish going against the grains.
6. Keep an eye out for runs.
When you roll your wood over, you can sometimes see where you’ve put a little too much varnish, and it built up. This is not good. Keep an eye out for that – especially on the underside.
When you rotate a newel post over to get at the bottom after having applied varnish to the three other surfaces, keep an eye out for running varnish. Any excess will have run over to the bottom side, and you want to fix this before it dries.
7. Fix any runs you find.
Sometimes you miss a run, and your varnish runs. So load up your brush just a little and get the majority out of it on a flat surface. Come over to where your run is and level it out. You don’t want any runs. Get a nice even coat. Get in there and work it out, back and forth until it’s even and consistent.
8. Do a final sweep.
Go over the whole piece of wood you are varnishing and make sure you leave no surface unsealed. Look for any blemishes or uneven spots. Feather everything the way it’s supposed to be.
Go back and look for brush hairs or any foreign objects in your varnish. Make sure it comes out, and then feather over to put the grain back in the varnish.
9. Sand it smooth.
After your first coat has thoroughly dried, come back and repeat the above steps as many times as needed until you get the sheen you’re going for.
Then come back with a sandpaper that is at least 1500-grit. Dip it in water and sand down all surface area. Don’t worry about scratching it. You’re not going to. Just make sure the sandpaper is dipped in water and keep a wet edge. What you will do is turn a course varnish into something that feels as smooth as glass.
What are the best tips and tricks for staining raw wood? We’re going to show you the proper way to stain raw wood by walking you through the steps for staining a raw newel post for a set of stairs. We will turn the post into a much darker and prettier wood.
Setting Up
For our stain, we’ve chosen to use Honey Minwax 272.
I want to show you the correct way to apply, so that you don’t stain your wood too dark or too light. It’s important to start with a good clean and smooth sanded surface on all the wood you’re going to stain. As we see on our newel post, everything’s been sanded down. Everything’s smooth.
Before you start, make sure you clean your hands really well. You want your hands to be free from oil and grime. You don’t want it to interfere, because this is an oil-based stain. And if you’ve got extra oil already on the wood or on your hands, it’s not going to apply very well.
Then we will get a conservative amount of stain on our rag. Use a clean cloth – something that doesn’t do a lot of shedding. And then we’re going to apply it in a large field area and spread it quickly. The reason to do that is because the longer stain sits on the surface of wood, the darker it gets.
If you want your wood item to be darker, then you can always apply a second coat. But once it’s dark, you can never make it lighter, because the wood sucks ups the stain.
The Application
So what we’re going to do is apply the stain quickly and spread it thin. Cover a lot of territory fast. Get the largest portion of the stain off of your rag quickly by covering as much territory as you can right off the bat.
Now that we have the stain largely off our rag, we’re not going to let it sit. We want to work it into the grain of the wood. Work it into the grooves as much as possible. There is always a lot more than stain in your rag than you realize. So get the majority off of it quickly.
This way, you don’t have dark spots or light spots. It’s all real even. As we can see from our newel post, it’s all starting to come together as we work into the grain and grooves repeatedly.
So you can see with just one cloth how much of the post we covered. With just one dip of stain on our cloth, we covered practically the entire piece of wood. It’s nice and even and beautiful. There are still some areas to touch up, but that covered the majority of it.
Next Steps
Next, we want to make sure everything is very lightly sanded again, and then we’ll apply a coat of clear semi-gloss polyurethane to give it protection. And the reason is because, if you don’t seal or urethane your stained surface, then it will still be susceptible to soak up oils. So if you walk with your hand across this piece of stained wood and you have any grease or grime on your fingers, it will soak it up and give the wood dark spots. We don’t want dark spots. So anytime you stain anything, come back with a clear coat and seal it.
I like to use Minwax polyurethane for my varnish. But use whichever you like best. This tutorial shows you the basics for the proper way to apply a stain coat to raw wood. We’ll show you in another post how to apply the polyurethane varnish.
Please share this video with anyone who might find it helpful, and let us know in the comments what you think!
Weather it be a fireplace mantle or accent wall or wood on a vaulted ceiling, I’m finding that popular demand is calling for stained wood inside high-end homes. And more specifically, the trend is for cypress inside their homes. Cypress is extremely big right now. We handle a lot of million-dollar homes down in south Walton county, and everyone is trying to get a line on some cypress. It’s very hot.
Pond Cypress v. Bald Cypress
So let’s discuss where the Cypress comes from. In the southeast part of the country, which is where we’re at, there are basically two common varieties of cypress trees. We have pond cypress and we have bald cypress. Both varieties are extremely hardy tress. They are slow growing and prefer wetlands. And they have an expected longevity of over a thousand years. If you leave a cypress tree alone, it’ll grow for a thousand years.
Pond cypress are a little more versatile because they don’t require wetlands. They can be in dry or wet areas. In fact you find a lot of landscapers will use these on high-end homes around ponds, down drain fields, and in irrigation areas. They can they can handle the drought as well as the floods. And that’s where you’ll find pond cypress.
They grow a little bit faster and mature a little quicker. They’re shorter, smaller, and a little bit fuller than their native cousin, the bald cypress – which is the one that I’m most interested in.
The bald cypress grows almost exclusively along rivers and in the swamp. And the bald cypress is known by many different names:
southern cypress
red cypress
white cypress
yellow cypress
gulf cypress
swamp cypress
bell-bottom cypress
Now, at the moment, I’m sitting on the Satilla River in southern Georgia. And I am surrounded by beautiful cypress trees. As the cypress grows down into the ground, it bells out creating a widening trunk and root “knees.” The root system is extremely complex, and these are very slow growing trees, strong and dense.
Plus these are almost entirely water-resistant or even water proof. This is why most people will use bald cypress for roof shingles or exterior doors or even for exterior siding. Cypress is used as a premium building material in high-end decor and accents almost everywhere in south Walton county. If you want to increase the value of your property or really make it pop, or if you want it to sell quick and have that curb appeal, then you want throw some cypress in there. Bald cypress is very hot right now.
Two Premium Cypress Products
But let’s discuss two specific kinds of bald cypress. There are two specific kinds that my homeowners are calling for right now. The first kind is called deadhead or sinker cypress. This is when a cypress tree falls into the water or dies and the cold water preserves it and knocks off the fat and holds the heart intact. All the sap condenses inside, and the cold water almost petrifies it. It makes it extremely dense, extremely rich, and absolutely gorgeous.
A pure deadhead cypress can sit in the river for a hundred years before it’s pulled out and milled and sent to your home for premium decor or a structural pillar or fire mantle, etc. It’s an ultra premium building material and very classy. If you want to impress your friends, throw some deadhead cypress products in your home.
The other kind is pecky cypress, something that I’m finding is in high demand around here. Pecky cypress is the product of a fungus that develops on the tree bark. It eats through the bark into the actual wood itself creating little caterpillar-shaped cavities. It goes on for tens and even hundreds of years and threatens the life of the tree. It can even kill the tree at times. But when this is milled, it creates an unbelievably beautiful effect in the wood.
If you’re looking for a way to increase the value of your home, blow people away, and help your house sell quicker than your neighbor’s, throw in some cypress for a touch of class.
If you have any questions on how to use cypress in your home, what kind of cypress to use, and where you might put it in your home, please reach out. I love to hear your comments and question. And we’re always happy to help.
![Should I Paint or Replace My Cabinets? [COST BREAKDOWN]](https://i0.wp.com/joscobayhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AdobeStock_210023621MED.jpg?resize=1080%2C675&ssl=1)
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So let’s discuss where the Cypress comes from. In the southeast part of the country, which is where we’re at, there are basically two common varieties of cypress trees. We have pond cypress and we have bald cypress. Both varieties are extremely hardy tress. They are slow growing and prefer wetlands. And they have an expected longevity of over a thousand years. If you leave a cypress tree alone, it’ll grow for a thousand years.
