Counting the Months Before You Move Back In
How long will your house be under construction during the remodel?
Six months? A year?? Your contractor isn’t sure???
In this post, you’ll learn how a whole-home remodel timeline breaks down front to back, what stretches it, and how long three Bunn & Sons Custom Builders‘ projects took.
How Long Does a Whole-Home Remodel Take?
A whole-home remodel can take 6 to 16 months, though ours typically take 6 to 9 months. The timeline mainly depends on the scope, whether walls are coming out, and site conditions.
Planning usually runs 2 to 4 months.
Construction typically takes 4 to 5 months. More specifically:
- A 3,000 to 4,000 square foot home takes roughly 4 months.
- A 6,000 to 7,000 square foot home is closer to 12 months.
The Planning Phase: 2 to 4 Months
Pre-construction covers everything from your discovery call to the day you sign a construction contract.
And we’re hawks with the pre-construction planning, diving into the granular details so we can ensure you get the space you need.
It moves through four stages:
1. Kickoff.
You meet your full project team at your home.
We complete a detailed digital site scan and run a Vision and Lifestyle Planning Session, so we’re designing around how you actually live in the space.
2. Concept Presentation.
We present layouts and aesthetic direction, then refine with you until you see your ideal space.
Your first major selections land here: appliances, cabinetry direction, fireplaces, and major equipment.
Each concept revision can take 2 to 4 weeks to complete and present.
3. Design Development.
This is where you start seeing your plan become real.
We do cabinetry and layout plans, lighting and electrical design, specialty trade coordination, and get full construction documents ready for permit submission.
You finalize every remaining selection, down to the paint.
This runs 3 to 6 weeks per round, and it’s where a whole-home timeline is won or lost.
Changing your mind here costs a conversation. Changing it later can affect the timeline and cost. If that happens, we’ll pause construction until you approve the new contract that has the updated price and timeline.
A lot of those reviews happen inside a live 3D model, with our designer spinning it in real time while we talk through sightlines, cabinet heights, and how the morning light hits the island.
4. Contracting and Construction Launch.
We hand you the fixed-price construction agreement, order and procure materials, confirm your permit is approved, set your start date, and schedule the trades.
Alongside all this, we are also handling:
- Land surveys.
- Soil tests.
- Energy-efficiency evaluations.
- Hazardous-material testing.
- Coordination of architects, structural engineers, designers, vendors, and building departments.
On a whole home, that coordination is the part that eats weeks.
Your trade partners work as part of the team to develop their own individual scopes, covering everything from demolition to final cleaning, and a whole-home project can put 20 to 25 of them on your project.
All of those scopes then have to mesh and deconflict with each other before anyone signs anything.
What You’ll Need To Handle
Your list runs in parallel with ours.
Expect to be:
- Clearing spaces out.
- Moving furniture.
- Making arrangements for a short-term rental.
- Figuring out how you’re going to cook dinner without a kitchen.
We’ll give you suggestions and point you in a direction on all of that.
The Construction Phase: 4 to 12 Months
The whole-home construction phase runs like this:
1. Site preparation.
Before anything comes out, we prep your home to be able to handle a major construction project:
- Dumpsters and porta potties on-site.
- Ram board or carpet shield down on every floor surface.
- Plastic zip walls up around the work zones.
- Air scrubbers on-site for dusty operations.
- Pre-filters over every air return inside the work zone.
- Furnace filters, so your forced-air system isn’t ingesting drywall dust for four months.
- Pull window coverings and wall fixtures out of the work zone.
- Cover anything that can’t be moved.
2. Demolition.
This phase is quicker because we’re just removing what you don’t want in your home anymore.
3. Framing, utilities, and rough-ins.
Framing comes first if your plans call for it.
Then the rough-ins for utilities: mechanical, electrical, plumbing.
Then inspections, with engineers looking at anything structural.
Insulation goes in after those.
Exterior work belongs in this stretch too if your project has any, so masonry, siding, windows and doors, and roofing all land here.
4. Finishes.
Now we put the space back together in the order that makes sense:
- Drywall.
- Flooring.
- Cabinetry and interior trim.
- Countertops and tile backsplash.
- Electrical trim out.
- Paint.
5. Final trim out and demobilize.
The crews come put the light switch faceplates on, hook up the faucets, test everything, and install appliances.
Then we pull all the protection back up and bring in a professional cleaning crew to dust, wipe, and clean every nook and cranny of the house, drawers and window sills included.
This is so a deep clean isn’t the first chore waiting for you in a space you just want to move into.
How much can a whole-home remodel cost?
What Sets Your Timeline: Scope, Structural Work, and Site Conditions
Your timeline moves on three things:
- How much of the house you’re actually touching.
- Whether walls are coming out.
- How hard your site is to work on.
1. Square Footage and Scope
A bigger house is more space to deal with, meaning it can take tradespeople longer to finish.
Then there’s the scope.
Scope is the list of work, and every item on it takes time.
New paint, new trim, and refinished floors in a room keep everything where it is, so the trades come through in a short line and move on.
Change what a room does, and the list grows.
Turning a formal dining room into an office means new electrical rough-ins for outlets and lighting, an inspection before anything closes up, then drywall, then the finish work.
Open the wall between that room and the kitchen, and it grows again.
This involves engineering during planning, framing, possibly installing a beam or post, another structural inspection, then patching the ceiling and floor where the wall used to be.
Now take that and multiply it across 3+ rooms, and suddenly that 4 to 12 months of construction makes a lot of sense.
2. Structural Work
Taking a wall out hits your schedule twice.
The first hit is in planning.
There’s not a jurisdiction in the Denver and Boulder metro that we know of where you can pull a wall without engineering attached to the permit application.
That engineering has to be done before we can submit, so it sits on the critical path to your start date.
The second hit is in the build, and how big it is depends on what the engineer finds.
Sometimes it’s a simple letter saying you’re clear to remove the wall, the city says fine, and we’re good to go.
Sometimes we’re told we have to add a beam and a post, plus concrete work down in the basement to carry a load that has nowhere to go yet.
That second one adds framing work, structural inspections, and a stretch where nothing downstream can start until an inspector signs off.
3. Site Conditions and Logistics
Site conditions change how hard it is to get people, material, and equipment where they need to be.
A steep lot or a tight site can turn something you’d knock out off a 6-foot ladder into a job that needs a boom lift delivered, fueled, and maintained for the project duration.
That takes more time and skill, and it carries more risk to manage.
If your home is on a windy mountain road, getting materials and equipment there can be time-consuming and difficult. We may have to get permits to block the road with trucks, which adds time and complexity.
And if you have a flat lot that sits on a wide road, that can make all of this quicker and easier.
Should you do it all at once, or room-by-room?
How a Locked Scope and Schedule Keep the Timeline Honest
A schedule holds when there’s nothing left to decide by the time the crew shows up.
Every decision pushed into the build stops work while it gets drawn, priced, and approved.
And changes don’t stay small.
Add a second ceiling fan, and you’re relocating the first one for spacing, reworking the lighting layout, and possibly the faux beams with it.
One change can affect three trades and a material delivery schedule.
That’s why we settle all of it during the 2 to 4 months of pre-construction.
While we’re building, you’ll have your own JobTread portal with the schedule, daily job logs with photos, and a summary of what happened on-site that day.
Real Front Range Projects and How Long They Took
Three of our whole-home projects, three construction timelines:
- The Roaring 20s in Boulder: 4 months.
- Restoring a Legacy in Broomfield: 5 months.
- Marooned in Paradise in Broomfield: 4 months.
The 1920s bungalow in Boulder came in at 4 months on a $265,000 investment, with walls and a closet removed to expand the kitchen, two bathrooms redone, and maple hardwood flooring run through the main level.
The Broomfield farmhouse took 5months and $540,000, and the extra month tracks with the scope: we gutted it to the studs, pulled load-bearing walls, reframed sections of the floor and roof, and replaced every HVAC, electrical, and plumbing system in the house.
Marooned in Paradise ran 4 months at $530,000 across three levels, including a basement torn down and rebuilt from the studs into 1,500 square feet of living level.
What to look for when hiring a contractor.
Ready to Plan Out Your New Home?
A whole-home remodel is really two timelines stacked together: 2 to 4 months of planning, then 4 to 12 months of construction.
Once you know that, the calendar stops feeling like a mystery and starts being something you can actually plan your life around.
If you want to know how long your project could take, fill out our contact form or give us a call.
