What Actually Sets Your Renovation Timeline (and What Wrecks It)
“How long will it take?” is the first question of every renovation, and the only honest answer is: it depends on four factors that get decided before the job starts.
The four factors in charge
- Permits. Paperwork does not speed up with urgency. Until your local authority responds, the job does not exist — and every office has its own pace.
- Supplies. A custom kitchen, a discontinued fixture or flooring shipped from abroad can set the calendar more than the job itself. Golden rule: demolition does not start until the critical items are bought or confirmed.
- Trade coordination. Plumber, electrician, builder and carpenter work in sequence, not in parallel. A three-day gap between two trades is three days of stopped work nobody refunds you.
- Your decisions. The most common delay is not caused by the job: it is the client choosing tiles while the tiler is already waiting. Every material decision, closed before the job begins.
How to protect the schedule
- Ask for the work plan by week and by trade, not a single end date.
- Ask which materials are critical and when they must be decided.
- Agree in writing what happens if the delay is theirs and what happens if it is yours.
A serious timeline is not the shortest one: it is the one that comes with a plan behind it.