Once you’ve got your style plan in place, you’re ready to graduate to tracking the items you want for your home in a set of remodel planning spreadsheets. These are going to make everything easier, and may even save you money!
There are so many moving parts in a home remodel. The master plan method is all about taking your planning in the right order and putting the right level of detail into your thinking to avoid getting totally overwhelmed. That’s why start by building a visual style guide rather than picking specific products. If you want to dig into the style guide concept, you want to check out this episode.
Episode: The Style Guide you Need to Keep your Remodel on Track
Once you’ve got your style guide set, though … it’s time to take your planning to the next level with some key remodel planning spreadsheets.
I’ve got spreadsheets that track my business, log movies and shows I want to check out, record budget information for past travels. I once made a list of the chronological date the birth and death dates of all my favorite fictional characters so I could see if they overlapped. I’m sorry, did you not know you were listening to a SUPER NERD?
Not everyone is a “spreadsheet person.” I know this. But even if you aren’t … your home update is one of the times it is worth it to make up a couple of essential remodel planning spreadsheets. Let’s talk about what should go into them …
To get you started: here’s an example of a contractor call log spreadsheet I use when I’m in the middle of getting bids. Stay on top of who’s told you what and who needs a call back with a simple spreadsheet!
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- The resource of the week is a two for one: The Idaho Modern Field Guide is a super helpful pdf resource. It walks your though “the history, are and keeping of your mid-century home,” and is shared by my super followable friend and mcm realtor, TJ, over at Mid-Century Homes in Boise. Grab the download and follow TJ using the links in my resources list!
- Why you need to START with your style guide before you graduate to remodel planning spreadsheets (seriously, I’m not kidding. The entire internet has too many options to pick from before you lock down your “look.”)
- How I use spreadsheets. I use them to compare apples to apples when looking at remodel bids. They’re handy for logging my contractor calls so I don’t forget who is asking me what. And they can help track the prices and specifications of all the finishes, fixtures, and appliances I want to use in my remodel!
- Exactly what info to keep in your remodel finish tracking spreadsheet.
Listen Now On
Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher
Resources for more about Remodel Planning Spreadsheets
- Get the free Style Guide workbook to start planning a beautiful and easy-to-manage remodel that’s perfect for your home.
- Grab my free Mid-Century Resources list to learn more about mid-century design the best way for you!
- Get your name on the wait list for Ready to Remodel so you can learn about how my students use these spreadsheets for planning success.
- Join us on in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Okay, now that you’ve got your Style Guide, all set, you have done your homework and created your Style Guide. Right? Good. Now you’re ready to take it to the next level with the essential remodel planning spreadsheets. Let’s talk about what you should be tracking to plan a remodel that will fit your life and budget.
Hey there, welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes; helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host Della Hansmann architect, and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to season eight, episode four.
Alright, so the new thing I wanted to do this week, or this season is a resource of the week. This week’s resource is the Idaho Modern Field Guide. The history care and keeping of your mid-century home. And this was put together by Preservation Idaho and Idaho Modern a few years ago. It’s Idaho-specific, obviously that’s in the name, but it’s talking about what homes were like in the postwar building boom.
It points out something that I think is really valuable, which is that mid-century homes were mid-century modern. In fact, most of them were not, they were mid-century vintage, mid-century traditional, mid-century colonial, builder basic. And then it goes into a bunch of the different parts of a house windows, doors, roofing,. It talks about the materials, the choices you might make in colors, in products, in fixtures, in built-ins, in choosing to add or update a garage or carport. There are things you can do to make your house more vintage appropriate. Plus it has knowledge you might want about what your house might have been like when it was originally built before all of the intervening, remodels and updates took over its style.
This is a great read and I highly recommend you check it out.
You can find it also by just going through the website of my friends Mid-Century Homes in Boise. Their website is mid-centuryhomes.com. You can find this under the media tab, the field guide, if you wanna just go straight to it. Boise Mid-century Homes is a great resource in general. If you’re looking to purchase a mid-century style home in Boise, well, of course they are your guys and gals. Actually they’re just a wonderful account to follow on the internet and I should say friends of mine. We’ve been putting together a Q&A weekly series, as well. We talk about the common questions that come up for them as they help people buy and sell mid century homes. And I answer them from my perspective as an architect.
So check those out. They’re gonna be happening on Instagram Fridays for the foreseeable future. We’re really having a fun time doing them. Next week we’re gonna be talking about updating front doors so I hope you’ll be there to check that out. Or, you know, you don’t have to be live it’ll just stay on the internet forever.
You can find their Instagram handle their website and the Idaho Preservation resource in the links in my show notes. That will be as always at midmod-midwest.com/804. And you can also get a download of the entire mid-century essential resources list. It’s a great checklist of books, articles, blogs, product suppliers, and concepts, people to follow that will get you up to speed and ready to have the most fun managing your mid-century house.
Diving into today’s topic.
Before you start picking out individual products you’re going to use in your home remodel, you need to have a style guide. Unless you start from your style guide, you will get overwhelmed. Today we’re going to actually talk about the more advanced version of this technique. We’re discussing what you do after your style guide.
Plan it all out with a spreadsheet.
And I am so excited to talk about this because I have a huge spreadsheet nerd, but believe me, you do not just wanna jump into making a list of the cool products from the entire internet. That is the fastest route to complete remodeling overwhelm. So start from your style guide and everything in your remodel will go better.
You can listen to more content on how to prepare a style guide, and you can grab my free style guide starting resource by going to episode 407. Or go to www.midmod-midwest.com/styleguide to download that resource. This will all be in the show notes. Basically in that episode, I walk you through why it’s so important to take the big picture of you first.
It has innumerable benefits, basically, as you create a style guide for your house, focusing on what are the stain colors, the metal types, the color scheme for your home, you can simplify, you can focus with all of the resources that are available on the internet. Trying to do anything else is just a recipe for complete overwhelm, but building out a style guide, which as I say in that episode is more than just a collection of Pinterest boards. It’s really a process of focusing what you want, distilling what you love into the specific types of material choices you’re gonna make again and again, through your house remodel project.
This is something we go over extensively inside of ready to remodel because it’s both a simple process and kind of challenging to do. A lot of people struggle with indecision in their remodel. They worry that they can’t trust their own choices and their own opinions. Or people worry that they’re gonna make an incorrect choice for their mid-century home. And we work through the process of how to feel confident about your choices, how to assess that they’re gonna work together, how to create enough variety in your style guide so that you aren’t rigidly locked into: there’s only one product you could actually pick that will work. But at the same time, narrow your options down. You don’t want to be overwhelmed in the plumbing aisle in Home Depot, or as you confront the internet on your smartphone or your computer.
Once you’ve got those things in hand, however, once you’ve got a style guide, you need to go a little bit further in order to plan a remodel. You can’t just show your style guide to a contractor and trust that they’re going to completely choose every product for you the way you want. You wanna be involved in some of these detailed decisions. So the next step beyond the style guide is to then turn those bigger picture choices into product selections.
This is also where the rubber starts to meet the road. In terms of your budget. For example, you might choose to repaint your house, dark gray, or black, a fun current moment. And by the way, if you’re working in paint, you can do something that’s a little trendy because you can feel confident that if someone else doesn’t like that trend in the future, they can repaint it in any color of their choice.
This is why I recommend painting your siding and not painting your brick because that is a permanent choice that nobody could undo. But if we’re thinking about exterior, so you’ve got a dramatic dark sided house. Now you want something to make it pop. You would like to have a Cedar as an accent. You wanna have this beautiful wood, it’s got a nice grain, it’s got a gorgeous color, warm amber mid-century appropriate.
Great. You’re gonna put Cedar as the detail around your house. This is what happens in your style guide. I want this tone of wood to happen outside.
Now where the rubber meets the road is you start to price it out. You talk to a contractor, you find out that right now, still in this moment now more than a year into the pandemic, um, it’s really hard to get your hands on Cedar.
Shoot. What are you gonna do? You can worry about supply line issues. You can extend out your planning window, or you can start to explore what are other options. If the style guide visual was that Amber tone would, could you do Cedar treated pine? Or find another type of wood and stain it. Are you open to the possibility of a faux wood, a low maintenance decking solution that could be used in place of wood, like a Trex or another. There’s a bunch of brands out there. They’re all relatively comparable. Basically you go from, I want it to look like this, to here’s, how we’re going to practically solve that problem.
And you might compare one product against another and think about what it feels like to touch. Always get samples. If your contractor perhaps has a deal with a particular company that might weigh in the favor of that product, they might have an easier ability to twist the arm of the person who’s going to get it to them and make sure that it comes on time. These are all considerations that you start to bring in in the later decision making phases.
As you start to make this decision for one material and then another, and then another, it adds up. You will not hold all of this in your head and you certainly won’t be able to keep track of the links to the websites and the budget numbers and how one budget item compares to another all in your head or even on paper. So this is where we turn to my dear friend the spreadsheet.
Let’s talk about spreadsheets for a minute.
I have found in my life that you are either a spreadsheet person or you’re not. Now I am one. So take this advice with that perspective. I have spreadsheets that track my business, log movies and TV shows that I wanna check out later, record budget information for past travels, I once made a list of the chronological birth and death dates of all my favorite fictional characters.
I was trying to figure out, you know, where do the Jane Austin stories that I love stack up against the Victorian era? How do these things time out? So, yeah, super nerd. I’m sorry. Did you not know you were listening to a super nerd? You are. Okay. So of course I use spreadsheets to keep track of my own and my clients remodeling work. And this is actually something that contractors and architects worth their salt are going to do exactly the same thing.
I have a range of these available as a bonus that I share with my design clients so they can keep track of these things to themselves after we’ve done our master plan. And these are available to my students inside of ready to remodel. This set of sheets includes a project bid form, which you can use to either request that your contractor fill in, or they usually won’t want to do that. Contractors, especially small scale residential remodelers are not generally spreadsheet people.
We’re talking about who is, and who is not a spreadsheet person, but you can work with them to fill in a spreadsheet with the data they give you and then you can use the bid comparison form to compare apples to apples and make sure that each contractor you’ve talked to is covering the same things and is giving you roughly the breakdown of numbers for the areas of work that you wanna do, or for the types of work electrical versus plumbing versus framing.
And then you can set a with an apples to apples comparison. I love you contractor number two, you are a great communicator and everything else about you is great, but your electrical bid is about twice as high as everyone else’s. Can you talk to me about that? Are you seeing something that I’m not seeing, that the other contractors aren’t seeing or what’s going on? Could we talk about a different electrical subcontractor? This kind of data takes the drama out of price and helps you control how these conversations go.
What else falls into this collection of remodel planning spreadsheets that I keep handy, um, project scope. Now that doesn’t necessarily have to fall into a spreadsheet. It could be a simple list, but when you put something into one spreadsheet, you can make another tab and another tab and keep them all together, a master list for your remodel.
In addition to scope, I actually sometimes just have to have like to have a call log for each of the contractors that I’ve been in communication with mark them down as a GC, an electrician, a plumber, HVAC, where they came from their contact information, their initial estimate, what they’ve told me about updated scope, when I spoke to them, what we talked about, If I have follow up information. Putting all this stuff down somewhere, it might be for you a notebook for me, I love the spreadsheet format allows me to go to one spot and get that information at a glance.
I should say before I go any further, I like to use Google spreadsheets for this. Now, if you are a Mac person, you might like numbers. If you’re a PC Excel, these inbuilt spreadsheet programs are great and they might be what you have easiest access to but at some point during your remodel, you’re going to need to share information with someone. And it can be very helpful to share a document with a spouse or partner to share a document with a designer, or to share a contractors tracking log directly. Then both of you can get access to the file at the same time, both of you can make edits to it. Both of you can see what’s happening in it. It’s really useful.
For any part of the project that you’re tracking over time or that you’re comparing one thing to another, or that you’re aggregating multiple data points together. It’s very helpful to have a spreadsheet. One of the most useful places to use a spreadsheet is for what architects and contractors call a schedule. In this case they don’t actually mean when something will happen. They mean a spreadsheet. And honestly, for the life of me, I have no idea why we call these schedules, but we do. So we will, uh, for a detailed architecture design, prepare lighting schedules, fix your schedules, finish schedules, door and window schedules. A set of schedules is basically separate remodel planning spreadsheets. These each link to a tag and then describe the various details of each product finish or appliance that’s going to be included in the house.
Let’s take for example, a finish schedule. So in your style guide, you might say that all of the metal you’re going to choose for the house is either going to be brass or white. That’s a fun set of choices. They are both very contemporary and trendy, and also tie back to the mid-century era of your house, win, win. So now you know that as you start to look for other things that you need to pick out for your remodel, you’re gonna start to make choices.
So for example, you’re gonna have to pick a kitchen sink faucet. You might choose a brass one. That’s a great choice. It’s not just going to look snazzy. It’s going to dramatically narrow down the number of possibilities you have when you go to Home Depot, or when you go online to a website like build.com and start selecting from all possible kitchen sink faucets.
As you make your choices, you might be comparing one to another and still keep a couple of options open. Or you might just pick one and you might say, I’m gonna pick a Moen faucet. It’s gonna be a pull down spray style. It’s from the align line. And it’s actually gonna be brushed gold. It’s gonna look brass because Moen is crazy and what they call brush gold is something that looks like brass. I’m gonna choose just one of them. I only have one kitchen’s sink and the price will be this.
Then you can put all of that data, the object it’s a kitchen sink faucet. The manufacturer Moen. The specification align, pull down spray faucet, product number 7565BG, finish brushed gold. There’s one in the unit count. The price, there you’ve got it, and a link to that purchase spot. All of this is put together.
You can go ahead and do that for all the different plumbing fixtures, all the different appliances, all the different flooring and wall materials, all the different paint, colors, all the different other surfaces: counters, mirror, shelves, cabinet faces, and hardware.
Make all of the choices at once. You can make a list of all the things you’ll need to choose and choose them over time. You can fill in the blanks as you go, and you can use your spreadsheet to highlight in yellow. I haven’t chosen this yet. And at some point soon, the contractor’s gonna need that choice for me.
Before you talk to your contractor show them that you know these things about your remodel. This will actually really help them to price with more confidence. Most contractor pricing is based on labor and materials. Their labor cost will be their estimate of how long they think it’s gonna take them to do it. Their material cost will be the price that they think they can get for all of the various raw materials. But they’ll often leave a third category known as an allowance for specific choices. This means things like your kitchen sink faucet, like the light fixtures you’re gonna choose.
And those things can actually add up to a lot of the cost of a remodel. You don’t see in the contractor’s bottom line, because they’ve left that out as an allowance. It’s not a trick. It’s just the necessary way that this planning process goes.
But for you, you can fill in that blank even before you’ve talked to a contractor. Certainly as you go along the way with your own confident list, your allowance pricing, and the more that you’ve made confident decisions about materiality, about some of the things that will be wrapped into the contractor’s number, the more that they know that you’re gonna be the kind of person to work with, who’s going to be clear, concise, and decisive, and they can then give you a really tight price.
That’s accurate as much as possible, rather than one, that’s got a little bit more squish in it. And the squish is for the contractor’s sake, always gonna have to make the price go up.
There’s a lot you can win both in your own piece of mind, your own organization, and in the way that you relate to the people that are gonna do the work on your house for you, or if you’re gonna do it, the simplicity doing the work on the day with the decisions made in advance, rather than realizing it’s time to install a faucet and then realizing you have to go and pick one while your brain was in production mode, that’s never a great place to be.
Once you’ve got your style guide in place, you can start to create a spreadsheet, a schedule, that puts together all of the details that you’re going to do. Keep track of what you want to do. And then later it shows what you’ve decided to do as you go through the remodel. In the end ,this can add up to the budget of what you spent in your remodel. It’s useful at every stage of the process.
The one thing I just wanna keep emphasizing as I talk about how wonderful and useful it is to make remodel planning spreadsheets to track your remodel is …. You have to start from the big picture and then focus in to get to your confident product by product decisions, start with your style guide, and then work your way down to spreadsheets to track it every product you choose.
I hope I’ve gotten you thinking a little bit more positive thoughts about how you’re going to run your remodel. Keeping track of things in a spreadsheet, if you’re not a spreadsheet, person can feel tedious. But if you are one and even if you aren’t, it is so empowering to see all of the data laid out in front of you. Pulling everything together in one place also helps externalize it. If you’re the kind of person who’s been holding your whole remodel in your head, that’s fine. But it can often be very hard to then share that information with your partner or with your team. Keeping a digital record of it is gonna allow you to make this so much more available to everyone involved in the process.
If you’re curious about the exact way in which I use remodel planning spreadsheets, and I advise my students and clients to manage their remodels with remodel planning spreadsheets, you’ll want to know more about the next launch of Ready to Remodel. Enrollment is gonna be reopening in March. Feels like moments from now, so put your name on the waitlist for the Ready to Remodel reopen. I’m gonna be talking about this and so much more ways to cleverly manage your remodel so you can plan and execute the exact right remodel for you, your family, and your house.
Total sidebar. If you happen to know why a remodeling spreadsheet is called a schedule, send me a DM on Instagram. Let me know: I am fascinate by this and a cursory Google did not answer the question for me. So, um, it remains a mystery to me.
I love them no matter what they’re called. I hope that you will try using remodel planning spreadsheets more to stay on top of your home update. Give me a shout out and let me know if you prefer to manage your details on paper in an old fashioned notebook. Or if you have another method for keeping track data outside of spreadsheets or something I’ve mentioned, I would love to hear about it.
Next week on the podcast, we’re gonna be taking our focus from this sort of middle development phase of the remodel all the way back to the beginning. I’ll be talking about how you can meet yourself, where you are, whether you’re planning a giant change, everything contract or remodel, or whether you’re thinking, can I change my house? How could I change my house? What one thing could I change about my house?
I’m really excited to talk about this with you. I feel like it’s so important to emphasize the accessibility of home improvement at whatever level you’re ready to get started. You can make a change to your home that will transform the way you feel about it. And that will empower you to make more changes in the future. So we’ll talk about that next week.