Homeowner guides
Reference material, useful whoever you hire.
These guides serve someone still deciding — and they stay useful if you hire a different company, or do nothing at all. Each one cites its official sources so you can check the work, and each records when a person last did.
Two ways to buy a remodel, and what each one costs you.
How design-build and the traditional designer-then-contractor route actually differ — who carries the risk when drawings and price disagree, and when the traditional route is the better choice.
Sources: Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services · Design-Build Institute of America
Should you stay in the house while it is being remodeled?
How containment, water and power shutoffs, dust, noise and losing heat in a Wisconsin winter actually affect a household — and how to decide honestly whether to stay or move out.
Sources: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency · Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Why the final number is rarely the first number.
What an allowance actually is, how change orders are supposed to work, which changes are genuinely unavoidable, and the questions that expose a price built to look low.
Sources: Wisconsin Administrative Code — ch. ATCP 110, Home Improvement Practices
Nine governments. Nine ways to price the same remodel.
Waukesha and Milwaukee counties contain nine separate permitting authorities, and no two of them calculate a remodel permit the same way. What each one charges, what needs no permit at all, and the rules that change a project's schedule rather than its paperwork.
Sources: City of Waukesha · City of Milwaukee · City of Pewaukee · Village of Menomonee Falls · Village of Elm Grove · City of West Allis · City of Wauwatosa
Forty-eight inches down, and why that changes the whole project.
Wisconsin's Uniform Dwelling Code puts footings below the frost line or at least 48 inches down, whichever is deeper. What that means for an addition's excavation, cost and calendar, the exceptions the code allows, and why a shallow-climate footing is answering a different question entirely rather than being a cheaper version of the same one.
Sources: State of Wisconsin · City of Phoenix · U.S. Census Bureau
More guides are added as they are researched and verified — never faster. A guide that cannot cite its source does not ship.
Reading done. Ready to talk specifics?
Bring the questions the guides raised — the first conversation is exactly where they belong.