Home After Complete Makeover

Renovation vs. New Construction: How to Decide. It is one of the first questions clients bring to us, and it rarely has a simple answer. Should we renovate the house we have, or build something new?

Home Before Complete Makeover

The first thing we look at is the structure itself. Some older homes have real value in their bones: solid framing, a sound foundation, a floor plan that can be worked with, original materials and details that can’t be reproduced. Those things are worth building around, and a renovation that preserves them is usually money well spent.

Other houses have none of those qualities. The framing is undersized by current standards; the foundation has problems; the electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems are at or past the end of their useful life; and the layout doesn’t work for how anyone lives today. When all of those conditions stack up together, the renovation estimate tends to climb toward what new construction would cost anyway.

Most houses fall somewhere in between. Some elements are worth preserving, while others need to be removed entirely. The challenge is determining which is which before the budget is established.

Brick Home Renovation After

You can renovate a house. You can’t renovate a location. If the property has a good view, mature trees, established landscaping, or sits in a neighborhood the family doesn’t want to leave, that matters as much as anything about the building itself. In the above brick home, the existing landscaping and patios were a deciding factor in keeping the first floor of a ranch house rather than taking it down. The grounds were worth too much to disturb.

If the lot itself is the problem, renovation won’t solve it. Poor drainage, difficult topography, an orientation that gets no useful light: none of that changes when the house does. Sometimes the right answer is a different piece of land.

Brick Home Renovation Before

Renovation is not always less expensive than new construction. Most clients come in thinking it will be. Often it isn’t. Keeping walls standing saves money when the structure is sound and the scope is contained. It doesn’t save money when the project requires opening nearly everything to bring systems up to code, reconfigure the layout, and deal with conditions that weren’t visible at the start.

Renovation work is also harder to price than new construction. Unknown conditions behind walls, code compliance requirements triggered by the extent of the work, the coordination required to build around an existing structure: all of it adds cost that doesn’t show up in early estimates. A major renovation of an older home can reach the same cost per square foot as building new. Sometimes higher.

It’s worth running that comparison honestly before any decision is made. The numbers usually tell a clearer story than the gut feeling does.

Westchester Renovation/Addition After

There is no single right answer, and anyone who claims otherwise probably has not worked through enough projects. We have renovated houses that initially seemed destined for demolition and transformed them into homes capable of lasting another hundred years. We have also advised clients, candidly, that the renovation they were considering would cost more and achieve less than building a new home on the same property.

Part of what we bring to that early conversation is an eye for what an older house actually has. Traditional detailing, well-made millwork, original hardware, genuine craftsmanship in the framing and finish work: these things have real value and are worth building around. They also can’t be faked convincingly in new construction. Knowing the difference is a big part of what makes the early evaluation worth doing.

What we can offer is a straight read of the specific situation: what the house is worth saving, what the lot offers, what the budget will realistically support, and which path is most likely to get you where you actually want to go.

Westchester Renovation/Addition Before

Article by Troy Curry. Photos by Rob Karosis. Before Photos: J. Crisp.  Brochure by Crisp Architects: Portfolio

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