Your Home Renovation Playbook
A one-page guide to what to expect during your home renovation journey.
Your Renovation Playbook
If you’re not sure where to start and what to expect, this page is the right place for you.
Cottage has helped hundreds of homeowners in 150+ municipalities across the West Coast on their home renovation journey. We've experienced the ins and outs of the process and we're excited to share what we know with you.
Feasibility
There are two main components during this phase - determining what’s eligible on your property and budgeting appropriately.
Eligibility:
If you’re looking to build an ADU, check out our article on eligibility or browse municipality-specific information. For all major renovations, we recommend meeting with a designer or architect to determine property-specific eligibility - start matching with pros here.
Budgeting:
For budgeting, you can get a preliminary construction budget estimate here. Project costs can vary significantly based on your local market, project type, and property conditions so if you have special considerations for your property, we recommend speaking with a Cottage homeowner consultant before kicking off your project.
Financing:
For financing options, check out RenoFi, a one-stop shop for renovation loan options. They offer loans based on After Renovation Valuation (ARV) that are great for new homeowners with less equity in the home, but they also have a wide range of different options (e.g. HELOC, personal loans) available for everyone.
Other Helpful Resources:
Design
Choose your Designer:
At this point, you’ve hopefully matched with designers via Cottage and chosen one to work with. Cottage’s proposal comparison tool helps you compare designers in a side-by-side view so you’re getting apples-to-apples, transparent pricing - refer to our guide here for more details.
What to Expect:
Your designer or architect will be leading you through this phase of the project. Each designer has a different process of getting you to the end product, so make sure you lay out your goals for the project clearly to ensure you’re on the same page. Usually, this phase will involve creative brainstorming, collecting your input and feedback, and going through a few iterations.
Budget Check:
Once you’ve aligned on the design, we recommend you take a step back here to do a budget check. It’s easy to let your design aspirations exceed what you’ve budgeted for the project by accident. Most general contractors should feel comfortable providing a preliminary estimate at this stage, with the caveat that engineering and consultants during the permitting phase may affect pricing, especially for more complex projects. If you have designs, you can get bids from our builder network via our platform.
Documentation:
After you’re aligned on the design, your designer will start compiling documentation and working with engineers and consultants (check out our article on which consultants you may need) to put together the necessary documents for permitting and construction. Your designer may have their own network of engineers but if not, you can also hire any engineer or consultant you’d need for your project on our platform.
Other Helpful Resources:
Permitting
At this point, your designer should have submitted the permit application to your municipality. Depending on the municipality, you can expect to wait at least a few weeks to get a set of application responses from each department. Your application needs to go through a number of departments before being approved (e.g. planning, building, fire, etc.).
Your designer will respond to architectural comments from the municipality, and coordinate with engineers and consultants for other comments that need to be addressed. It’s very common to go through multiple rounds of comments and responses before reaching final approval.
If you haven’t already started getting bids from contractors, now is the time as you’ll have some waiting time on your hands with most municipalities. Many homeowners start to coordinate with the builder to purchase finish materials (e.g. cabinetry, tile, countertops, flooring, appliances, etc.) during this time.
Construction
Congratulations on getting to this point! Once you have an approved permit, your general contractor should pull the permit from the municipality once they are ready to mobilize their crew. They’ll be your point of contact for this phase, so we’d recommend scheduling a kickoff meeting to make sure you’re on the same page about the scope of work before they break ground! Read our article here on choosing the right contractor and comparing bids.