What a Renovation Really Costs, and Where the Quotes Hide Money

Three contractors walked the same 148-square-foot kitchen in Sellwood inside of nine days, read the same one-page scope note, and came back with bids $41,300 apart. Bid A was $63,400. Bid B was $22,100. Bid C was $58,900. Only one of those numbers was wrong, and it was not the big one.

The family's first reaction was the normal one: two of these people are gouging us. A spread like that almost never means that. On a kitchen this size, a $41,000 gap is not a pricing difference. It is a scope difference. The three bids were not describing the same kitchen.

What the three bids actually priced

The house is a 1926 bungalow. The kitchen is a galley with a breakfast nook, 148 square feet, 14 linear feet of base cabinetry and 9 feet of wall cabinets. The scope was deliberately modest: keep every wall, move the sink four feet under the window, replace cabinets, counters and flooring, repaint, reuse the range and refrigerator bought last year. Everyone got that note in writing.

Read down the Bid B column and the mystery evaporates. No countertop. No electrical at all, on a kitchen where the sink and dishwasher are moving and the panel is a 1960s replacement with two spare slots. No dumpster, no contingency, and the cabinet figure is an allowance rather than a quote.

Bid B was not cheap. Bid B was a smaller, incomplete job, quoted honestly enough by someone who assumed the homeowners would handle the rest and never said so. Outright dishonesty is rarer than people expect. Silence is everywhere.

The six items missing from almost every cheap quote

Across eleven years of bid reviews at bumfuzzledjane.com, the same six omissions account for most of the distance between a quote and a final invoice.

1. Code-driven electrical. A remodel is not a like-for-like swap to an inspector. Small-appliance branch circuits, dedicated circuits for dishwasher and disposal, GFCI protection at every countertop receptacle, spacing so no point along the counter sits more than 24 inches from an outlet. Here, $6,800 to $7,900 one bidder never mentioned.
2. Disposal. A 20-yard dumpster in Portland runs roughly $550 to $800 with tonnage, and a gut kitchen fills more of one than people believe.
3. Countertop template and fabrication. The slab is only part of the number. Templating happens after cabinets are set, fabrication takes 7 to 12 working days, and the sink cutout, edge profile and seam all price separately.
4. Drywall and plaster repair. Old cabinets take wall surface with them, and in a plaster-and-lath house they take more than you want. One to two days of a finisher's time.
5. Scribe, filler and trim carpentry. No wall in a 1926 house is plumb, and making a rectangular box meet one that leans three quarters of an inch over eight feet is the difference between cabinets that look installed and cabinets that look bought.
6. Permits, plan review and inspections. Cheap relative to the job, and routinely left out of the number entirely.

Ceiling paint, the floor transition at the doorway, hauling old appliances and the final clean go missing too. None is expensive alone. Together they are $3,000 you did not plan for.

What an allowance really means

An allowance is a placeholder. The contractor is saying: you have not chosen this yet, so I put a number in to make the total look finished. It is not a price. It is a guess about your taste, usually a conservative one, because a low allowance makes a bid more competitive.

Bid B's $8,600 cabinet allowance covered stock boxes with laminate interiors. The family had sent all three a photo of inset painted cabinets with plywood carcasses, a $19,000 to $24,000 item at that linear footage. The allowance was not a lie. It simply had nothing to do with the kitchen the clients were describing.

Here is how one becomes a change order. You select tile at $14 a square foot against an $8 allowance. The change order bills the $6 difference on 90 square feet, plus markup on it, plus extra labor because you chose a 2-inch mosaic rather than a 12 by 24, plus trim pieces the allowance never covered, plus waste because the pattern has a direction. A $540 upgrade lands as $1,900.

The defense is simple and almost nobody does it. Before signing, ask in writing what specification the allowance assumes, with a product name, then go price that product. If nobody can name it, the allowance is fiction. Turning every allowance into a selected, priced item before contract is most of what the Renovation Advisory retainer does in week one.

Contingency: 10 to 20 percent, and what eats it

A quote with no contingency is not a cheaper project. It is the same project with the surprise costs moved off the page and onto your credit card in month two.

• 10 percent for a cosmetic refresh in a house built after 1990 where nothing opens up.
• 15 percent as the default for most kitchen and bath work.
• 20 percent for anything pre-1960, anything where a wall comes out, and anything where you cannot see the subfloor.

What eats it, in rough order of frequency in Portland housing stock: rotted subfloor under the sink base, knob-and-tube or ungrounded wiring found once walls are open, a drain line with no vent that has worked by luck since 1954, floors out of level by over an inch, galvanized supply pipe, an undersized panel, and asbestos in old sheet vinyl or its adhesive.

The other thing that eats contingency is you. Every selection made after demolition begins costs more than the same one made six weeks earlier, because it now carries a schedule impact. That is the real argument for locking the sequence and the selections before demo.

Normalize the scope before you compare anything

You cannot compare three bids that describe three different jobs, and asking contractors to bid "a kitchen" guarantees they will.

1. One scope sheet, identical wording for everyone. Item by item, with dimensions.
2. A fixed line-item format. Same categories, same order. The table above exists because all three were made to use one.
3. Named products, not categories. The cabinet line, the counter material and thickness, the faucet, the floor. Where something is genuinely undecided, set the allowance yourself and give all three the same one.
4. A written exclusions list. The most useful question you can ask is what is not in this number. Get it on paper.
5. Unit rates for the likely unknowns. Cost per square foot of subfloor, cost to add a circuit, hourly rates for the electrician and carpenter. Agreeing these before the wall opens removes the leverage from every later change order.
6. The same payment schedule. A bid taking 50 percent at signing is a materially different offer from one taking 10.

Normalized, the Sellwood bids came back at $63,400, $55,800 and $58,900. A spread of $7,600 on a $58,000 job, which is normal variation between three competent companies. The $41,300 gap had never been real. There is more on that build in the project notes.

A fair change order versus an opportunistic one

Change orders are not a sign of failure. On a pre-war house they are a certainty. What matters is whether the document records something genuinely unforeseen or bills you for something that was always going to happen.

A fair change order has all of these:

• It arrives before the work is done, not with the final invoice.
• It describes a condition nobody could reasonably have seen at walkthrough, usually with a photo.
• It uses the unit rates already in the contract, with materials and labor hours shown separately.
• It states the schedule impact in days.

An opportunistic one tends to have at least two of these:

• A lump sum with no breakdown. "Additional framing as required, $2,400."
• It covers something plainly visible the day they quoted, such as a sloping floor or an obviously undersized panel.
• It re-bills work already inside the base scope, worded slightly differently.
• It arrives after the work, with the materials installed and the leverage gone.

Answer every one in writing within 24 hours, even if the answer is "hold, questions following." Silence reads as approval on a job site. A change order queried on day two is a conversation; the same one queried on day thirty is a dispute.

Permits, and the pre-1978 question

Moving a sink four feet means a plumbing permit; rewiring a kitchen means an electrical permit, whatever anyone tells you over coffee. Trade permits are a small fraction of the job cost and the contractor should pull them under their own license. If you are asked to pull one yourself, know what that means: you become the responsible party for work you cannot inspect. Unpermitted work surfaces later anyway, at resale or when an insurer asks about the origin of a fire. Read the dimensional standards the NKBA publishes too, because a kitchen can pass inspection and still be miserable to cook in.

If the house predates 1978, add one requirement. Any contractor disturbing painted surfaces must be certified under the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule and use contained work practices. Ask for the firm's certification number and check it; the EPA lead-safe certification program sets out what they owe you. In Portland, where most of the housing stock predates the war, that covers nearly every house we advise on.

How the Sellwood kitchen ended

The family hired the $58,900 contractor. Not the $22,100 one, and not the cheapest normalized number. Bid C had the most legible document, the clearest exclusions and a real answer on the panel. They then cut two items, keeping the original fir floor found under the vinyl and painting the room themselves. Contract signed at $53,700.

One change order arrived, for a rotted sill plate under the window where the sink now sits, at $2,900 with photographs and hours shown. Final spend $56,600: under the middle quote, $6,800 under the highest. Any of the three would have found that rot on the same morning. Two had priced a contingency for it. One had quietly assumed it away.

The lesson is dull and worth repeating. A renovation quote describes a job, it does not price one, and most of the money hides in what the document leaves out. Read the exclusions before the total. Convert every allowance to a real product. Insist on contingency. Normalize the scope first.

If you are holding bids you cannot reconcile, that is the work bumfuzzledjane.com is built for, and usually the cheapest line on the project. Renovation Advisory is $2,200 a month and generally pays for itself on the first review. For a smaller job, a Design Direction Call at $295 will tell you whether the scope is sane before anyone prices it. For a bathroom, read where the money goes in a small bath; if you have not decided who to work with, start here.

Or send the bids over. Get in touch with all three PDFs attached. Jane has read these documents since 2014 and takes no commission from any supplier or contractor, which is the whole reason she can tell you a number is wrong.