Halloween to New Year's: How to Plan a Spring Renovation

Between Halloween and New Year's, very few families want a crew in the house. School events fill the calendar, Thanksgiving falls on November 26 this year, and December fills up on its own. That makes late fall a poor time to start construction and a good time to plan it. A renovation in Fairfield County or Westchester that begins in March or April is mostly decided in the months before: the design, the drawings the town needs, the selections, and the orders that take longest to arrive.

Why a spring start is decided in the fall

Most of the time on a renovation is spent before anyone picks up a tool. Design goes through several rounds. The drawings then have to be complete enough to price and complete enough to permit, and those are two different standards. Town review takes its own time, and some properties need zoning, wetlands or historic district approvals that run on meeting calendars with fixed submission deadlines. The permit guides for New Canaan, Greenwich and Westport cover what each town asks for.

Then there are the things you choose. Custom cabinetry, windows, specialty tile and some appliances are made or shipped to order, and one late item can hold up everything installed after it. The renovation selections timeline sets out which decisions come first.

A project planned over the winter can start in spring with approved drawings, a price based on real selections and the slow items already on order. A project that starts planning in spring tends to start building later than anyone hoped.

A planning calendar, month by month

This assumes a project that needs a permit and a few months of design. A kitchen that keeps its layout can move faster. An addition that needs zoning review will move slower. The phases themselves are laid out in planning a whole-house renovation timeline.

Late October and November: the first conversation

Walk the house with your builder, and with your architect if you have one, while you still remember how it worked over the summer. Gather what already exists: surveys, old permits, previous drawings, the year the house was built. If the property might need zoning or wetlands review, find out now. Those calendars set the pace for everything that follows.

December: scope and a budget range

December is busy for everyone, so keep the work light. Review early plans, agree on the scope, and ask for a budget range you can react to. For kitchens, the kitchen budget guide lists the costs an early number tends to leave out.

January: drawings and the first selections

Develop the design into drawings the town can review, and make the selections that affect the building itself: appliances, plumbing fixtures, windows and the cabinetry layout. Each of those can move a wall, a drain or a circuit, so they belong in the drawings before the permit set is finished.

February: permits, pricing and orders

Submit for permits. Refine the price against the selections you have made, and place orders for anything with a long lead time.

March: the start date

Agree the schedule and how the house will be protected. If you plan to stay in it during the work, read living in the house while it is being renovated before you settle how the phases will run.

Use the holidays to test the house

Hosting is the most honest review a house gets all year. For one afternoon it has to do everything at once, and the weak spots show. If you are planning to renovate, keep a running note on your phone through Thanksgiving and December, and write down what happens. A designer can do more with that list than with a folder of magazine pages, because it describes your house and the way your family uses it.

What to write down:

• Where people stand. Guests gather wherever the food is, which usually means the kitchen and usually means in the way. Note where the crowd forms and where the cook has to squeeze past.
• How many people the island seats, and whether anyone can sit across from each other.
• Where the coats, boots and bags end up. If the answer is a bed upstairs, the house may be short a mudroom or a hall closet.
• How long the line for the powder room gets, and how far it is from where everyone is sitting.
• What you ran out of: oven space, burners, counter, outlets. If a breaker tripped with both ovens and the coffee maker running, write that down too. It is a question about the electrical service, and it belongs in the design.
• Where the dirty dishes waited, and how long the cleanup took with one sink. A butler's pantry is often the answer people arrive at after a few years of this.
• The light. Clocks fall back on November 1, and by Thanksgiving it is dark before five. Notice which rooms feel dim and where you wanted a lamp you did not have.
• The coldest room on a December evening. That tells you something about insulation, windows and heating before anyone opens a wall.

What an old house tells you in winter

October is when old houses start making noise. Radiators knock when the heat comes on and floors creak, and a door that closed easily in August starts to stick. Most of it is harmless. Some of it is worth a closer look before you design a renovation around it:

• Ice dams or long icicles along the eaves, which usually mean heat is escaping into the attic.
• Condensation on the inside of the windows, which can point to high indoor humidity or failing glass.
• A room that never gets warm, whether from the heating, the insulation or air leaking in.
• Doors and windows that bind every winter. Usually that is moisture in the wood. Occasionally it is the structure moving.
• A musty smell in the basement once the windows stay closed.

None of this has to be solved by Thanksgiving. It does belong on the list you bring to the first meeting, because it changes what the renovation has to include and what is likely to be behind the walls. What to keep when you renovate an old house covers the other half of that conversation.

Can anything be finished before Thanksgiving?

Not if it involves demolition. A kitchen that changes its layout needs design, a permit and cabinetry built to order, and that takes longer than the weeks left before November 26. What can usually happen before the holidays is work that needs no permit and has no long lead time: painting, repairs, a door that sticks, a faucet that drips. Get those done if they bother you, and keep the larger project on the calendar for spring.

If more space is the real problem, the winter is also the right time to compare building up with building out, since an addition is the project most likely to need extra approvals.

Bring your list to a first meeting

For a spring start, the first meeting is best had before the holidays. Bring the address, any drawings or surveys you have, a rough sense of budget, and the notes from your holiday list. Request a consultation and we will walk the house with you and tell you what the approval path looks like for your property, which is the first thing that decides whether spring is realistic.

The short version

• A spring start is mostly decided between October and February: design, drawings, permits, selections and orders.
• Have the first conversation before Thanksgiving if you can. Zoning, wetlands or historic review sets the pace for everything else.
• Treat the holidays as a test of the house. Note where guests gather, what you ran out of, and which rooms were dark or cold.
• Old houses show their problems in winter. Add ice dams, window condensation and cold rooms to the list.
• Small repairs can happen before the holidays. Work that needs a permit or ordered materials is better planned now and built in spring.