Counting the Calendar Before You Count the Cost
How many months will your home be a construction zone?
Will the project run past whatever date you were promised?
And are you supposed to live in it the whole time?
In this post, you’ll learn the real timeline for a whole-home renovation here in Southlake, what stretches it, and how the plan behind the project decides your finish date.
By the end, you’ll know what a realistic schedule looks like and the biggest factor in whether it holds.
How Long a Whole-Home Renovation Takes in Southlake
A whole-home renovation in the Southlake area usually takes 6 months to 2 years, depending on the size and scope of the work.
A lighter refresh lands near the short end, and a full down-to-the-studs reconfiguration runs toward two years.
Once Stately Design & Renovation understands your full scope, we can hand you a detailed schedule.
The home renovation checklist to follow.
Your Timeline Depends on How Far You’re Going
“Whole-home renovation” covers a lot of ground.
Repainting every room and refinishing the floors is a different animal from taking a house down to the studs, moving walls, and doubling its footprint.
The bigger the change, the longer the calendar.
Our whole-home projects average around $340,000, so these are large jobs with a lot of moving parts.
Here are the timelines across real homes we’ve built:
| Scope of the whole-home project | Where | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Taken to the studs, square footage doubled | Copper Canyon, TX | 14 months |
| Our largest whole-home renovation plus a major addition | Flower Mound, TX | 18 months |
The size of your home, the number of rooms in play, and how much structure has to move all pull that number up or down.
Check out this whole-home renovation we did in Argyle.
The Phases In Our Whole-Home Renovation Process
Design and Planning
This is the phase that decides everything else.
We sit down and pull your vision onto paper, then bring in the right architect or designer for the job.
Selections get made, and plans get drawn.
Through what we call an Opinion of Cost, you get a real budget before you choose a single finish, and a firm project price once the design is locked.
No demolition or anything else happens until this phase is complete.
Demolition and the Build
Now the demolition starts.
On almost every whole-home job, we move load-bearing walls and reroute plumbing that runs through the concrete slab, work a lot of homeowners have been told can’t be done.
A dedicated project manager is on-site every single day, sequencing the trade partners who have built alongside us for over a decade so they’re never competing for the same space or redoing each other’s work.
We run it like air traffic control: one person watching the whole project at once and catching conflicts early, before they turn into the delays that push a finish date.
Quality control happens daily instead of at milestones, and that same manager walks the house with you every week, so you always know where the project stands.
When a challenge comes up, and in an older home, it will, we solve it on our end and bring you the fix rather than the problem.
A whole-home demo throws off more dust than most people expect.
To keep the house livable, we seal off the work areas, cover the surfaces we’re not touching, change your AC filters weekly, and pull tile using a dustless system.
Final Walkthrough and the 30-Day Return
In the last couple of weeks, we build a finish list with you and work through it before we close out.
We then finish construction with a professional cleaning and a power wash of the exterior, so the home is ready for you to move into.
Then we step away for 30 days.
You’ll notice small things once you’ve settled in, so we ask you to keep a list so we can come back and handle them all at once.
Behind all of it is a 1-year warranty on materials and labor, and we stand behind the work well past that.
What Stretches a Whole-Home Timeline
Two homes the same size can finish months apart, and a handful of specific things explain most of the gap.
Structural Work
Moving walls, rerouting plumbing, and reframing a layout are all the slowest, most involved work in the whole project.
It takes time because none of it is quick: opening the slab to move a drain line, re-supporting the house before a load-bearing wall comes out, and reframing the structure around your new layout are all heavy, methodical jobs.
We do this on almost every whole-home renovation, so the more of your layout that changes, the more weeks this phase pulls.
Systems
Electrical, plumbing, and HVAC sit behind your walls, and a whole-home renovation usually means updating all three.
That work stretches the timeline because it has to be roughed in, inspected, and closed up before finishes can start.
With our hot Texas summers, HVAC is not a corner you want to cut just to save a little time.
Material Lead Times
Custom cabinetry and specialty tile aren’t sitting on a shelf waiting for you.
They add time because they’re ordered to spec and can take weeks to arrive, and finish work can’t wrap until they show up.
The fix is ordering early, which is one more reason the decisions belong in the design phase rather than mid-build.
Surprises in Older Homes
An older house tends to hand us things no one could see on day one.
On one job, we opened a wall and found it packed with pipes nobody knew were there.
On another, a ceiling beam carrying three stories had sagged almost three inches, so we engineered a replacement and jacked the original back into place before the project could move on.
Discoveries like that add time because the work stops until we solve them with you, which is why we build that possibility into the timeline from the start.
Changes You Make Mid-Project
Every design decision made after demolition begins turns into a change order.
Change orders stretch the timeline because they interrupt work already in motion, sometimes undoing a step the crew just finished.
That’s the whole reason we push selections to the front end, where a change costs you a conversation instead of a week.
Why Your Finish Date Is Set Before the First Wall Comes Down
Most renovations run long for the same reason: the contractor hands you a rough estimate instead of a finished plan.
Then work begins before the real decisions are made, so those decisions end up getting made in the middle of a torn-up house, and every one of them stalls the crew.
We handle it differently.
Before demolition, we complete the full design, make the selections, and hand you a fixed-price contract.
With the decisions already made, there’s nothing to stop and figure out once the crew is swinging hammers, and that’s the difference between a schedule that holds and one that drifts.
Will You Be Living in the House During Construction?
For most whole-home projects, the answer is no.
About 75% of our whole-home clients buy a new place and are renovating it before they move in, so they’re never sleeping on a job site.
If you’re staying put through a full renovation around Southlake and Westlake, we plan the site around your daily life and walk you through what to expect before we start.
From Studs to Settled-In on a Timeline You Can Trust with Stately Design & Renovation
We keep whole-home timelines predictable by settling every design decision and locking a firm price before demolition ever starts.
That front-loaded plan is what keeps a project moving instead of stalling in the middle of a torn-up house.
Fill out our contact form today or give us a call, and your dedicated project manager will map out a clear schedule from day one, so you know your timeline before construction ever touches your home.
