Five Phases, No Surprises
What actually happens between the day you call a remodeler and the day you get your house back?
And does the price ever stop moving?
In this post, you’ll learn the 5 phases of a Stately Design & Renovation project, what gets decided in each one, why 3 of them happen before anybody swings a hammer, and what you should have in writing before you approve construction.
What Are the 5 Phases of a Stately Renovation
Here’s the whole sequence:
- Discovery and feasibility. We come see your house, learn how you use it, and give you an opinion of cost before a single selection is made.
- Design development. Plans get drawn and every selection gets finalized, either by our team or by your architect and designer.
- Final pricing and build approval. Your written scope of work becomes a fixed price.
- Construction. A dedicated project manager runs your job and is on-site every day.
- Closeout. We build a finish list with you, clear it, then come back 30 days later to ensure everything is to your satisfaction.
1. Discovery and Feasibility
Justin, our senior project manager, comes to your house, whether you’re in Southlake, Grapevine, Coppell, or anywhere else in NE Tarrant County.
He walks the space with you, takes measurements and photos, and looks for the things you can’t see from the doorway.
The other half of this visit is figuring out how you actually live in the house.
What you walk past every day wishing you could change, which rooms you use and which ones you’ve quietly given up on.
Bring us photos of spaces you like, too, and we’ll ask you what you like about them.
We learned not to guess. Look at a photo and assume the homeowner loves the cabinet door, and you’ll find out they were pointing at the faucet.
Then the whole design can get built around the wrong detail.
If you want something done, we’re going to figure out how to do it, and we’ll be straight with you about what it adds.
Opinion of Cost and Pre-Construction Agreement
Justin gives you an opinion of cost, and we’ll tell you plainly that it isn’t a definitive number.
If you’re comfortable with it, you sign a pre-construction agreement.
That agreement carries a non-refundable deposit that’s deducted from your project cost should you move forward with us.
It’s what keeps us from spending time building your estimate and watching it walk out the door to another builder. We do have to pay our team for the work they put in.
2. Design Development
Already have a designer?
We pull their drawings and selections and go through all of it.
Designers come up with the look in their head, and they don’t always understand how the thing gets built.
So we’re working with them to see what’s actually buildable and what’s going to add cost.
No designer?
Tori, our office manager, has an interior design background and can help you make selections, plus we’ve got showrooms and reps if you want to put your hands on the material.
3. Final Pricing and Build Approval
Your scope of work becomes your price.
They list every step because we’re trying to take the gray area out of what’s covered and what isn’t.
Justin writes it, then Tori reads it, Rick reads it, and the project manager who’s actually going to run your job reads it.
Everybody looks at a space a little differently, and we’d rather catch the gap here than in month 2.
Once the contract is signed and the deposit is in, we set your start date.
4. Construction
Your project manager builds a schedule in weeks, not fixed dates.
These are the weeks of your project, and this is what we’re going to accomplish each week.
Holding to that schedule comes down to having every selection ordered up front, which is why we get them selected and locked in during design.
There’s a job board in our office that Tori updates every week, so the whole team walks in each morning and sees which jobs are on pace and which aren’t.
Now if something we can’t control happens, like it rains all week and the concrete slides, we update the schedule and alert you to the change.
5. Closeout
About a month out from the end, your PM walks the project against the scope of work line by line, and anything not checked off goes on a finish list.
He works that list again at 3 weeks out, 2 weeks, 1 week.
When it’s clear, you’re move-in ready.
Then we ask you to live in it for a month and write down anything you find, and we come back after 30 days for touch-ups and punch items.
Who Handles Design, and What Happens If You Already Have a Designer or Architect
The design can be handled by someone you’ve hired or by our team.
On larger projects, we engage an architect and an interior designer to develop the project, draw the plans, and finalize the selections.
For smaller projects where you have a clear direction, we handle design in-house.
Before any designer gets involved, your project lead sits down and works up a detailed rough design with you, using 18 years and a couple thousand houses’ worth of pattern recognition to help you figure out what you’re actually after.
Our goal is to pull the vision out of your head and get it on paper.
Then the designer takes it from there.
What you end up with is floor plans, design visuals, and a finished selection list.
What You Receive Before Construction Begins
Signing the pre-construction agreement buys you 3 things:
- Proposed floor plans, with up to 3 revisions.
- A material selection sheet.
- A construction contract with your final fixed price.
The proposed floor plans are your layout drawn to scale, showing where walls, fixtures, and cabinetry actually land.
You get up to 3 rounds of changes on them.
That’s the number for a reason.
One pass is rarely enough to catch what you don’t like, and past 3 you’re usually not improving the plan anymore, just moving things.
The material selection sheet has every material and fixture going into your project, listed in one place.
Tile, countertops, cabinets, flooring, plumbing fixtures, hardware, paint, etc.
This isn’t a mood board.
It has the actual specifications we’re going to order from, so nothing is still open to interpretation once the trades show up.
The construction contract with your final fixed price carries your scope of work and one number attached to it.
That’s the document that turns everything above into a commitment.
Whatever is on that scope is covered by that price.
The pre-construction agreement comes with a non-refundable deposit. If you move forward with us, it comes off your project total.
You can walk away, and some people do. It just means our hours don’t walk away with you.
It holds us to something too. Once you’ve signed it, we’re on the hook to finish the work and get you a real number.
How the Work Stays on Schedule Once the Build Starts
Your job gets a dedicated project manager who is there every day.
Not all day. Every day.
He meets the trades in the morning to get them started, checks in around midday, and comes back through in the afternoon.
That means you’re seeing and talking to them just about every day, sometimes more than once.
If you’re traveling, or if you’ve moved out while we work, you get texts, calls, and a standing weekly meeting at your house instead.
Many of our trade partners have been with us more than a decade, so they know the work and can do it efficiently and well.
What Can Move Your Schedule
Two things can push a finish date.
The first is what nobody can see through drywall.
We’ve opened a wall on day one and found it packed with pipes right where a door was supposed to go.
If something like that happens, we can meet you at the house and show you exactly what we found. If you’re traveling, you get a phone call.
Either way, we talk through what needs to be done, and if it’s something you want fixed, we price it and get your approval before we move on.
We won’t just send you a bill for it.
The second is you changing your mind, which happens on almost every job.
Your contract has a change order section, and it states plainly that your scope of work is covered by your price.
Nothing gets added unless you’re the one making the change.
We’d rather you change it than live with it.
After building a two-story fireplace, the homeowner told us he didn’t like how the stone looked.
He knew we’d done it right.
He just didn’t like it, and he offered to pay to tear it down and rebuild it.
So we did.
How Our Process Ends By Taking Care of You
Before you move back in, a professional cleaning crew comes through and takes care of your home. We also power wash the exterior areas we worked around.
Then we take care of your punch list.
The punch items you’ll actually care about don’t surface until you’ve lived in the finished space for a few weeks, so we build that wait into the process instead of pretending the job ends at handoff.
Left alone, that turns into 5 trips back over 3 months.
We’d rather make 1.
Keep your list for 30 days, and we’ll come back, spend 2 or 3 days knocking it out, and then get out of your hair.
Some of what lands on that list is damage from moving back in, like a dresser chipping wood off a doorframe or a scuff on new trim.
Not our doing, but we’ll fix it anyway.
After the 30-day trip, we stay reachable. Call us past the warranty period, and we still come out to take care of you.
Our featured projects show the results of our process.
Always Know What Comes Next With Stately Design & Renovation
The order isn’t arbitrary.
By the time we break ground, your plans, your selections, and your price are already settled, so you always know which phase you’re in and what’s coming next.
Fill out our contact form or give us a call, and we’ll get you started.
