Whole-Home Renovation
A gut renovation is not five projects stacked on top of each other. It is one project with one critical path, and it only works when a single team is accountable for all of it.
What demolition exposes gets dealt with, not covered again.
New service, new circuits, new supply and waste throughout.
Trim, doors and floors that agree between storeys.
In short
Most whole-home renovations run $150,000 to $1.5 million, driven by house size, how much of the mechanical system is replaced, and finish level. As a planning figure, gut renovations in this market tend to land between $200 and $400 per square foot. You cannot live in the house during a true gut — no kitchen, intermittent power, open walls — so we plan the schedule around your rental term.
Overview
We take the house down to framing, replace what is at end of life behind the walls, and rebuild every room to one specification. New heating and cooling, a new electrical service and panel, new supply and waste plumbing, insulation and air sealing, windows — then the kitchen, every bathroom, the laundry, the stairs, the trim and the floors, drawn and priced as a single package rather than negotiated room by room as the money runs down.
New Jersey’s older housing stock is the reason this work exists. A 1920s colonial or a 1960s split typically has knob-and-tube wiring or an undersized panel, galvanised supply lines, no wall insulation at all, and a plan built for a household that cooked in a separate room. The structure is very often excellent. It is the systems and the layout that need replacing, and doing those one at a time means opening the same walls three times.
Because everything is open at once, the specification can be genuinely coordinated: one door and hardware schedule through the house, trim profiles that agree between floors, a lighting plan drawn as a whole rather than assembled room by room, and floors that run through where they used to change at a threshold. That coherence is most of what people are actually buying, and it is only available while the walls are open.
What we do
The finishes are what you see. These are where the money mostly goes, and what decides whether the house is still good in twenty years.
Gut back to studs and subfloor, then the structural assessment demolition finally makes possible: rot, undersized joists, previous alterations that quietly removed bearing, and the openings you want that need engineering.
Read moreA new service and panel, circuits throughout to current code, and heating and cooling sized by load calculation for the house as it will be insulated — not as it has been.
Read moreSupply and waste replaced from the main to the fixtures, stacks re-vented properly, and runs planned around where the kitchen and baths are going rather than where they happen to be.
Read moreWall and roof insulation, a continuous air barrier, and window replacement flashed so it actually integrates with the weather layer. This is the pair of line items that changes how the house feels to live in.
Read moreEvery wet room and every built-in specified together, so tile, stone, hardware and paint agree between rooms instead of arriving from five separate decisions months apart.
Read moreStair work, doors, casings, base and flooring run as one schedule through the whole house — the detail that makes a renovated house read as designed rather than repaired.
Read more
Open at once
Everything is open at once. That is the constraint, and the entire opportunity.
It is the only moment you can run a floor through without a threshold, agree trim profiles between storeys, and draw a lighting plan for a whole house rather than one room at a time.
Recent work
Whole houses taken back to the frame and rebuilt. Open one to see it room by room.
View projectMercer County · 2024
Full gut of a 1960s colonial: new mechanicals, insulation, windows and a unified finish package.
DetailView projectMercer County · 2024
Renovated staircase with oak treads and a bronze handrail
DetailView projectMercer County · 2024
Primary bedroom with new plaster walls and replacement windows
How a gut renovation runs
The same four stages, over the longest continuous programme most homeowners will ever commission.
We survey the house, open exploratory holes where we need to see, and give you a candid read on whether gut renovating this particular building is the right call. Sometimes it is not, and hearing that in week one is worth a great deal.
Plans for every floor, a mechanical strategy, and a complete finish schedule priced before demolition. On a project this size, an unspecified room is simply a change order that has not happened yet.
Demolition, structural repairs, then mechanical, electrical and plumbing rough-in, insulation and air sealing — each with its own inspection before anything is closed up.
Drywall, millwork, kitchen and baths, floors and paint, sequenced by your project lead with a written update every week. Then commissioning, final inspections and the walkthrough.
Where we work
Older housing stock is the reason this work exists, and every town has its own. A 1920s colonial and a 1960s split fail in completely different places.
Towns we work in most often
All 21 counties
Questions
Most whole-home renovations we complete run $300,000 to $1.2 million, driven by house size, how much of the mechanical system is replaced and finish level. As a rough planning figure, gut renovations tend to land between $200 and $400 per square foot in our market.
Yes, for a true gut renovation. With no working kitchen, intermittent power and open walls, the house is not habitable. We plan the schedule around your rental term so you are not paying for both longer than necessary.
It usually is when the location and the bones are good — original framing, a sound foundation, a lot you want to stay on. It is usually not when the structure itself is failing, because you end up paying new-build prices while still inheriting old-house constraints. We tell you which one you have during the feasibility study.
Three to nine months on site depending on the size of the house and how much of the structure and mechanical system is being replaced, with design and permitting ahead of that. The long pole is usually the mechanical rough-in and its inspections, not the finishes.
You can, and sometimes budget makes it the only option, but be clear about what phasing costs. It means opening the same walls more than once, running mechanical work twice, and losing the coordination that makes a finished house read as one design. Where a phase boundary can follow a floor or a wing it works; where it cuts through the mechanical system it rarely does.
Eleven months, a full gut, and we lived in a rental the whole time. They planned the schedule around our lease so we were not paying double for a month at the end. Small thing that saved us real money.
Related work
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