Homeowner guide
Two mechanisms explain most of the gap between a quoted price and a final invoice. Neither is dishonest by nature. Both are easy to use dishonestly, and both are checkable before you sign.
The short answer
An allowance is a sum carried in the contract for something you have not chosen yet — tile, fixtures, appliances, lighting. It lets a project be priced and started before every selection is made. When you eventually choose, the real cost replaces the allowance, and the contract price moves by the difference in whichever direction it goes.
A change order is different: it is a documented change to the agreed scope, priced and approved before the work happens. Discovering rotten framing behind a wall produces a change order. Deciding you want a second sink produces a change order. Both are normal.
Neither mechanism is dishonest. Both are how a project that cannot be fully specified on day one gets built anyway. What separates a good contract from a bad one is whether they are used to tell you the truth early or to make a number look low until you are committed.
Allowances
An allowance is only useful if it reflects what you are actually likely to choose.
Used well
Used badly
This is why comparing two bids on the bottom line alone is close to meaningless. A lower number with thinner allowances is not a lower price — it is the same project with more of its cost deferred into a phase where you have less leverage. Compare the allowance schedules, or you are not comparing the bids.
Change orders
A change order that arrives after the work is done is not a change order; it is an invoice. A usable one is agreed in advance and contains all four of these:
What is changing
In enough specificity that someone who was not in the conversation could tell what was added or removed.
What it costs
A price, not a range, and a statement of whether it affects any allowance.
What it does to the schedule
Added work often adds days. A change order silent on schedule is half-written.
Signatures before the work
Approval in advance is the entire point of the document.
A high volume of change orders on a project is a signal, not a scandal. Sometimes it means the house surprised everyone, which happens. Sometimes it means the scope was never developed enough to price honestly — and that is a design failure sold as bad luck.
The distinction that matters
Every change is one or the other, and the difference tells you whose problem it was.
Discovery
Something nobody could see: failed framing, a drain that does not run where the drawings said, undersized wiring, water damage behind tile. Investigation during design reduces these but never removes them, because opening a wall is the only way to see inside it with certainty.
These are legitimately unforeseeable. What is fair to expect is that they are found as early as possible, documented when found, and priced before the work proceeds.
Decision
Something you chose: a different tile, a moved wall, an added fixture, an upgraded appliance. These are entirely normal and entirely within your control.
The cost of a decision rises steeply with when you make it. Moving a shower drain is a drawing edit during design, a slab cut during construction, and a demolition problem after tile. This is the single strongest financial argument for resolving selections before work starts.
Before you sign
The last one is the most revealing. A contractor who can answer it immediately and specifically has thought about your project. For how these mechanisms sit inside a whole project, see the process, and for what moves cost in the first place, the investment page.
Before you rely on this
This guide describes general contracting practice, not any particular firm’s terms — including Monarch’s. Your actual allowance schedule and change-order procedure are whatever your signed agreement says they are. Read it, and ask for anything above that is missing.
Check these yourself. Statutes and municipal codes change, and the version your jurisdiction has adopted is the one that governs your property.
Bring both. The allowance schedules and exclusions are where the real difference usually is, and it is a useful conversation whether or not you end up working with us.