Things We Tell Clients Every Week
By April Bettinger | Nip Tuck Remodeling
Why do remodeling projects go over budget?
This is the underlying question for every homeowner hesitating to start a remodel. They’ve heard the horror stories. A kitchen that was supposed to cost $100,000 and take six weeks somehow became a $150,000 project that dragged on for four months or more. The project that consumed their lives still didn’t feel complete.
Here’s what most homeowners don’t know: The industry standard for budget variance is somewhere between 10 and 20%. At Nip Tuck Remodeling, we hold ourselves to a 2% contingency. The difference between these two standards is never luck; it’s achieved by design and determined before construction starts.
It’s important to acknowledge up front that budget is foremost in the minds of homeowners who are seriously considering a kitchen, bathroom, or whole-home remodel. It’s as important to realize that almost every budget overrun traces back to any one of three culprits, sometimes all three at once.
Murphy Likes to Hide
Murphy’s Law reminds us that if something can possibly go wrong, then it will. In the late 1940s, Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an aerospace engineer, voiced his frustration regarding a gauge malfunction, which ultimately led to the coining of this phrase. And while this adage has been distorted from its original meaning, Murphy’s presence still seems to haunt us.
When we begin the discovery phase of a home remodel, we recognize that every house has a history. Behind the walls of a 1985 Bellevue colonial, for instance, are 40 years of decisions made by people you’ll never meet. When we open those walls, Murphy shows up in the form of water damage that was never addressed, previous DIY projects that violate code, pipes running exactly where they shouldn’t be, and electrical that may have been fine in 1987 but no longer meets current safety guidelines.
These discoveries are what make up most of our 2% contingency. The difference between a firm that manages them well and one that doesn’t is anticipation. We’ve been in enough Eastside homes of a certain age to know what’s likely behind those walls before we open them. We build for what’s probable, not just possible. And Murphy may still surface. But we make certain that he doesn’t get to derail the project when he does.
Occasionally, even anticipation isn’t enough. In Happiness Guaranteed, I share the story of a family whose project took an unexpected turn when we opened walls and found conditions we couldn’t ignore — code violations that had to be corrected and structural issues that couldn’t wait. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you certainly can’t leave it. What was planned for Phase 2 had to be incorporated immediately into Phase 1.
That kind of discovery is rare. When it happens, however, the unexpected can be navigated successfully when the firm and the client have a solid relationship. The conversation is hard but it’s honest, and everybody knows where they stand.
Read our guide on the questions you should ask before hiring a remodeling company.
The Cruise Ship and the Gap Between What’s Perceived and What's Matter of Fact
Many homeowners arrive at a remodeling conversation with a figure already in mind. They’ve done their research, and to their advantage, the research available today is genuinely better than it was a decade ago. The HGTV era gave homeowners wildly misleading benchmarks for what remodeling projects cost. AI tools and online resources have made available more realistic information. But research still has a natural starting point: the room itself.
Let’s say a homeowner researches kitchen remodeling. They get a sense of what cabinets, countertops, and appliances cost. Maybe they call a cabinet maker, obtain a flooring quote, and talk to a painter. They do enough to understand that the project is bigger than they can manage themselves, and somewhere in that process, a number takes shape in their head.
What that number rarely accounts for is everything that is part and parcel of remodeling a room: the structural work a layout change requires, the permitting process and what it triggers, the mechanical updates that become mandatory once walls open, and the professional oversight — design, project management, trade coordination — that a custom remodel requires from first conversation to final walkthrough. A gap exists between the homeowner’s perception of remodeling and what the actual remodeling process truly entails.
Some homeowners are particularly vulnerable to this lapse — not because they haven’t been thoughtful, but because their reference points are working against them. A family relocating from the Midwest brings real remodeling experience and reasonable expectations for where they’ve been. A homeowner who has acted as their own general contractor on past projects has a number built on a different labor model than full-service design-build. And anyone whose last remodel was more than five years ago is working with a figure that inflation has made irrelevant.
These are exactly the homeowners most susceptible to a contractor who operates on a simple theory: come in low and upgrade your way to the real number. Quote the entry-level version of everything. Win the job. Then watch the selections change — because they always do, because people want what they actually want — and let the upgrades close the gap between the number you bid to get hired and the number the project actually costs.
When that doesn’t close the gap fast enough, the change orders start. Every change made during construction, every material changed after it’s been ordered, and every decision made under pressure rather than in planning contributes to scope creep. The homeowner who started with a number in their head chose a firm that honored that number and is now six weeks into a project that it is already over budget. They just don’t know the full amount of the bill that is coming.
If you have ever been on a cruise, then you know that for two weeks, there’s no money changing hands. You order drinks when you want them, browse the boutique, book excursions, and enjoy every bit of it. You have a wonderful time! And because nothing feels like a transaction in the moment, you don’t really keep track.
Then the night before you disembark, the envelope slides under the door. Suddenly there’s a list of every optional, discretionary thing you enjoyed over the previous two weeks. All at once, the time you were having doesn’t seem quite as wonderful.
Remodeling can often mirror that experience, and it starts the moment someone says, “we’ve been thinking.”
"We've Been Thinking"
Imagine that a project manager arrives on site one morning and the homeowner meets them at the door. “We’ve been thinking…,” begins the homeowner. “Can we add this, change that, and include this?”
Each decision feels reasonable in the moment. These are the discretionary additions, the upgrades that seemed logical once the project was taking shape. No money changes hands that day, and the project moves forward.
But it isn’t always grand additions that hike the bill. Sometimes, the smaller tallies add up. And invariably, confusion and disappointment follow. “I don’t remember choosing that.” “Now that I see it in person, I don’t love it.” “I thought that was included — how is it not?” When a project has gone through a thorough pre-construction process — when selections have been made with 3D renderings, when every line item has been reviewed and confirmed — these moments are rare. The homeowner has already seen the space, lived with the decisions, and had the chance to change their mind before anything has been ordered or built. For projects where that process was rushed, skipped, or compressed into a few conversations, these moments are not the exception. They’re the pattern.
I say all of this knowing full well that I am not immune. When we remodeled our main floor, we made a deliberate decision to leave the small primary bathroom alone. It was already tiled. It seemed fine. We planned everything else. And then on the first day of demolition, my partner and I walked the house together seeing the fresh slate of every space as it opened up, and we came to that bathroom. Standing in the middle of what was about to become a completely transformed main floor, it suddenly didn’t seem fine anymore. It had to go.
The next morning, we told our carpenter Marv to demo it.
We were happy we did. We made the right decision and the room came together. But here’s what I know, as someone who teaches pre-construction for a living: I had already ordered the vanity in a finish that matched the old bathroom. Had I planned it properly from the start, I would have chosen a finish to match the other bathroom instead. It worked out. But it would have been better, and it would have been easier, if we’d made that decision three months earlier rather than on day one of demolition. So, even when changes are the right call — and sometimes they genuinely are — the timing of those decisions can push limits and typically increase costs.
How your experience ends depends almost entirely on whether your remodeling partner is writing change orders as you go — asking for your approval and real payment for each decision in real time — or letting them accumulate without your awareness and then presenting the total at the end. This is one of the most significant differentiators among firms and one of the primary reasons homeowners end up unhappy at the end of a project they were excited about at the start.
The change order is not the enemy. It’s the mechanism that keeps both parties honest. We’re genuinely glad when a client wants to add something mid-project. But it will cost more, and it will likely extend your timeline. How and when that truth gets delivered is what separates a firm that manages your project from one that just builds it.
The One Culprit You Have Control Over
Murphy’s Law comes into play all too often. Situations like that of the cruise ship sometimes leave us with the sinking feeling that we’ve gone overboard. And while some of the best additions to a project start with “we’ve been thinking,” these extras always increase the budget. But the single most common reason remodeling projects go over budget is the simplest one: not enough planning before construction starts.
I watch this play out on remodeling forums constantly. Homeowners deep into a kitchen remodel are still choosing tile. Couples are changing their cabinet color after the cabinets are already ordered. People are starting construction without finishing the design phase, without locking selections, and without making the choices that should have been made months earlier. And now they’re making these decisions under pressure, with materials on site and the labor clock running.
Every decision made during construction instead of pre-construction costs more. Every selection changed after it’s been ordered costs more. Every week of delay because something wasn’t decided in advance costs more. And these decisions are entirely within a homeowner’s control when made before construction ever starts.
Murphy’s Law, over time, has basically taken on a negative connotation. But in fact, the phrase “anything that can go wrong will go wrong” is more of a challenge for us to do better and to excel at what we do. The pre-construction process — real pre-construction, where every scope item is defined, every product is specified, every subcontractor has priced the actual work — is the single most effective thing a homeowner can do to protect their budget. Not because it eliminates the chance of disruption. Not because it prevents you from ever wanting to add something mid-project. But because it means the spirit of Murphy has less room to get in the way of your remodel, the cruise ship bill can be smaller, and the number on paper at the end of the project looks a lot like the number that was there at the beginning.
Want to understand how we build a budget you can actually trust before construction starts? Read our complete guide to kitchen remodel investments in Bellevue or reach out and let’s talk through what pre-construction really looks like for your project.
