When undertaking a home project, whether building a home from scratch or remodeling an existing house, one of the first steps is to determine your budget. This is a critical guideline that shapes the scope and detail of the project. It’s a relatively straight-forward process to define what you want done to your home, how much you feel you can afford, and where those two things meet. However, once you get into the selections process, you can be tempted to exceed your budget.
Why What You Want Can Blow The Budget
“Selections” are the fixtures and finishes that you choose for your home; appliances, tile, flooring, countertop material, and other details. When shopping for these items, it’s easy to be romanced by more expensive options, thereby creeping outside your budget. You may have intended to go with quartz countertops, but when you visit the store, you fall in love with a pricey granite. Perhaps when choosing tile for the bathroom, you’re attracted to a costly imported glass tile. Or, when you shop wood floors, your champagne taste steers you toward a product that simply doesn’t fit within your budget. Despite a very carefully designed project, it’s easy to lean towards bigger price tags as you make your choices. Winthorpe understands these temptations, and we’re able to help.
How We Make It Work
As we proceed through the project, we take the existing budget into consideration when we discuss selections at each stage, and we can alter some decisions accordingly. Let’s say that you recently chose your countertops and decided to exceed that segment of your budget by settling on a beautiful marble slab. So, now when we discuss which appliances you want, we know we need to come in under budget for that segment of your plan. And we can!
How do we do this? Well, it takes some extra time and legwork on our part, and some flexibility on your part. When it’s time to shop for those appliances, we’ll first discuss what features you most desire. Let’s say you want a double oven, microwave, refrigerator, and dishwasher, all in stainless steel. Maybe you want the microwave to be drawer-style, and you saw a Wolf brand model that you really like, but that exceeds your budget. We’ll take the features you desire most and shop for substitutions that are more affordable but still offer most, if not all, of the features you want.
In another example, you may have found lighting fixtures that you absolutely adore but that won’t fit within the budget because they are expensive and/or because you already spent more on other selections and now the budget is reduced. Winthorpe is adept at finding similar items, either in the Maryland and Washington D.C. areas, or online, at more reasonable prices. Our eyes are on the market all the time, enabling us to source options effectively. So, you can have the look you want and still maintain your budget. Similarly, if you’re eyeing a fancy tile, we may be able to steer you to an option that looks much the same but may be discontinued and therefore better priced.
One other consideration may be to alter the design of your plan to cut costs so you can spend dollars in other areas. If you decide that you really want that granite countertop for the kitchen island but it’s just exceedingly expensive, we discuss things like reducing the size of the island or removing another feature from the plan. Maybe you really want a Wolf stove and a Sub Zero fridge, so to accommodate those price tags we explore not extending the kitchen wall or not putting in the skylight. As long as these decisions are made early enough in the project, they can be great solutions. Waiting to make design changes until after some of the work has been done, however, can actually cost more.
It’s human nature to want the more expensive option, but we think you’ll find that once your selections are installed and you’re no longer comparing them to other options, you’ll love what you’ve chosen and the way it looks. Many builders won’t spend the time to seek substitutions and leave the burden on the homeowner to solve their own budgetary conundrums. At Winthorpe, we think it’s worth doing. We’re here to help you plan ahead and explore all possible avenues so you get the best project you can afford.
