Whole-House Renovation in Auburn, WA: What to Expect

A whole-house remodel in Auburn usually starts with one complaint and turns into a list. The kitchen is closed off, the only full bath is too small, the floors don't match from room to room, and the electrical panel is older than the people living there. Fixing those one at a time over ten years means living through ten rounds of dust and paying to open the same walls more than once. Doing them together, from one plan, is what a whole-house remodel is.

Here is how we walk Auburn homeowners through it: what the house you have changes about the project, what gets decided first, how the money typically breaks down, and what living through it is like.

The house you have decides most of the plan

Auburn has three very different kinds of housing, and a whole-house remodel looks different in each.

Valley-floor homes near downtown

Around downtown Auburn and on the valley floor you find early-1900s houses and postwar ramblers. The older homes tend to have small rooms, a kitchen at the back, one bath, and decades of patch-and-repair behind the plaster. The ramblers from the 1940s and 50s are simpler, but their floor plans are chopped up: a closed kitchen, a separate dining room, a narrow hall to the bedrooms.

In these homes the remodel is often about two things at once. The first is opening the plan so the kitchen, dining and living areas work as one space. The second is the systems: older wiring, galvanized supply lines, undersized panels and little or no insulation in the walls. Once the walls are open for the layout change, it is the right moment to deal with all of it. Before we promise any open plan, an engineer confirms which walls are carrying the roof, and the design follows from that.

Lea Hill

Lea Hill mixes 1970s through 1990s houses with newer plats, and lots there tend to be larger. That changes the conversation. A whole-house remodel on Lea Hill often includes a basement finish or an addition alongside the interior work, because there is room on the lot to grow instead of squeezing everything into the existing footprint. Split-levels and split-entries from that era also have a lower floor that never got the same attention as the main one, and bringing it up to the same standard is part of making the house feel finished.

Lakeland Hills

Lakeland Hills is almost entirely 1990s through 2010s planned-community construction. The structure is usually sound and the layouts are reasonably open, so a whole-house remodel here is less about moving walls and more about replacing builder-grade everything at once: cabinets, counters, flooring, trim, doors, lighting and the primary bath. The work is still a whole-house project, because the finishes all have to agree with each other, but the budget goes into what you see and touch rather than into structure.

What gets decided first

The order matters more than people expect. Finishes are the fun part, but they come last, because the decisions underneath them decide what is possible.

• Structure and layout. Which walls move, whether a beam is needed, where the kitchen and baths end up. This is where the engineer comes in.
• Plumbing locations. Moving a sink or a toilet a few feet is often simple; moving a bathroom to the other side of the house is not. We settle this before anyone chooses tile.
• Electrical and mechanical. Panel capacity, circuits for a modern kitchen, lighting plans, ventilation and heating. In older Auburn homes this is often the hidden part of the budget.
• Insulation and windows. If walls and ceilings are opening anyway, this is the cheapest time it will ever be to improve them.
• Finishes. Cabinets, counters, floors, tile, fixtures and paint, chosen together so the house reads as one design instead of a series of projects.

We work through all of this in 3D before construction. You can walk through the new layout on a screen, see how the kitchen opens to the living room, and change your mind while a change still costs nothing but a conversation.

How the budget typically breaks down

Whole-home renovations in the Auburn area generally range from $75,000 to $150,000 for a cosmetic-and-systems refresh to $200,000 to $450,000 or more for a comprehensive top-to-bottom transformation of a larger home. Where your project lands depends far more on the house than on the finishes you pick.

The things that move the number most:

• How many walls move, and whether any of them are bearing walls.
• How much of the plumbing, wiring and heating has to be replaced to meet current code once the walls are open.
• Whether the project adds square footage (an addition or a finished lower level) or stays inside the existing footprint.
• How many kitchens and bathrooms are in the scope. They are the most expensive rooms per square foot in any house.
• Surprises in older homes: rot under a bathroom floor, old wiring, or framing that was altered by a past owner.

The way to keep surprises from becoming budget problems is to look for them early. In valley-floor homes especially, we open up the likely trouble spots during design when we can, and we carry a realistic contingency rather than a hopeful one. Every project gets a fixed price from a finished design before construction starts, and we can help you look at financing options if you want to phase the investment.

Permits in Auburn

Auburn straddles the King and Pierce County line, which confuses a lot of homeowners. For addresses inside city limits, permits typically go through the City of Auburn regardless of which county the house sits in. A whole-house remodel that moves walls, plumbing or wiring generally needs a building permit, and the electrical and plumbing work carry their own permits and inspections.

We prepare the drawings, submit them, answer the review comments and schedule the inspections. The City of Auburn's permit center has the current requirements for your address, and we will not promise a review timeline we do not control.

Living through it

Most families ask whether they can stay in the house. The honest answer is that it depends on the scope. If the kitchen and the only full bath are both being rebuilt at the same time, most people move out for at least part of the work. If the house has a second bath, or the project can be phased so one area stays livable, many families stay.

We plan that with you during design, not after demolition starts. Phasing can keep a working bathroom and a temporary kitchen available, at the cost of a somewhat longer schedule. Either way, you get one project manager who knows the whole plan, dust control between work areas and the rest of the house, and a clear picture each week of what is happening next.

A real Auburn project

Not every Auburn project is the whole house. One we are proud of is a single room: a dark, dated bathroom that the family wanted filled with light. We opened it to the trees with a big black-framed window behind a freestanding tub and kept the finishes soft and pale, with a white oak vanity, limestone-look tile and brushed brass. You can see the before, the design and the finished room in the Nguyen bathroom in Auburn.

The same approach scales to a whole house: figure out what the family actually wants from the space, design it completely before building, and let the finished rooms look like they belong together.

Where to start

If your Auburn home has a list instead of a single project, the first step is a walkthrough. We look at the structure, the systems and the layout, talk through what you want the house to do for you, and tell you plainly which parts belong in phase one. You can read more about our whole-home renovation work or see what we do for renovation projects in Auburn.

When you are ready, request a free quote and we will set up a time to see the house.