Are “Phase 1” Projects Simply A Waste Of Money & Time?

Q: You are putting time and energy into this “temporary” job for your bathroom (not to mention some money), so why not simply go ahead and do the full gut job? I know you folks watch money truly well, but is not this not the most cost-effective in the long-run? :) – Karen

A: This is a strong question, and we thought it would be lively to elaborate on the subject. Because it is safe to say that we enjoy saving a buck, but we also like showing an old house some enjoy and making it feel like home, so here is our take. First of all, I think a lot of people think like Karen does – in fact we had that same exact instinct when we moved into our first house. It was so tempting to simply to freeze a room until we had the budget to fully redo it.

But we slowly learned that sometimes a small “sweat investment” in the form of a few upgrades to tide you over for a year or two until you can save up the loot to fully redo a room (and truly think it through) is fully worth the Phase 1 effort and the small amount of money you might sink into that interim upgrade. And sometimes doing a few small things to improve a space before diving into a bigger redo can in fact save you money because they give you a chance to (inexpensively!) figure out what you like and what you do not like as you go. It can certainly cost you more if you do not discover those things until the middle of a big gut job when time is money and the stakes are a lot higher.

Let us take our current bathroom makeover, where we are aiming to spend around $100-200 on a Phase 1 makeover.

We got to the point where we simply could not live with the old carpet in there for another day, so to us, showing the room some interim enjoy simply made a lot more sense than living with things that made us groan for a few more years. Especially since inexpensive updates like a few cans of paint and a new mirror (which can consistently be used in another room down the line) can easily make it a lot more pleasant in there. Note: this is simply a photoshopped rendering of our plans, but next week we hope to have the floors stenciled!

Why not simply get to gutting things right away? Well, we learned all the way back in our first house (even before we began blogging) that doing a full renovation when you only live somewhere a few months means you might not have time to think everything through. For example, it took us over a year of living with our first kitchen to realize that if we closed off a door we’d gain 70% more counter space. Had we rushed into a renovation, we never would have come up with that plan – so we’d have new counters and cabinets – but the same cramped layout that we began with.

Soon after moving in we did a Phase 1 makeover while we saved up for a more major reno down the line. Simply some paint on the cabinets and peel and stick tile on the floors (along with updating a few appliances that we reused when we fully redid the room). Let me simply tell you, it was so worth enjoying a somewhat updated kitchen for that time (during which we got married in the backyard and had 75 of our friends and family over). Sure, we spent a weekend painting the cabinets, another weekend updating the floor, and dug into our savings for about $150 simply for Phase 1 (that is a guess at the total cost for the primer, paint, and the peel & stick tile) but the “return” on that money & time investment was that for over a year we got to walk into a room that felt fresher, cleaner, and more like us, instead of feeling stuck or frozen in the before shot for over a year.

When we had at last saved up the money – and had fully thought it through – we got to renovate that kitchen and ended up loving the outcome. It was fully worth the small time/effort up front for a Phase 1 update while we saved our pennies, and the fact that we ended up with a fully redone space that we adored (with a lot more function than anything we could have slapped together right away after moving in) certainly confirmed that this phase-by-phase, over-time method simply seems to work for us.

The same thing happened in our full bathroom at that first house of ours. We began with this carpeted and crocheted space…

… and we did some plain updates like pulling up the carpeting, re-caulking things, adding some paint, and bringing in some sweet art, new lighting, and accessories to tide us over for a few years.

But up close both the floor and wall tile was cracked and damaged, so although we enjoyed it, we sadly could not salvage it.

So when we at last had the money and time to tackle a full gut-job a few years later, we were excited to dive in. And thanks to spending a lot of time planning every step, we only spent around $1800 on a full bathroom renovation, including rebuilding this room from the studs (new walls, new trim) along with a new marble tile floor, new fixtures, a tub/shower that we tiled to the ceiling, a new custom vanity, etc.

But it was certainly pleasant not to spend years living with this carpeted bathroom with a duck curtain, and do that Phase 1 update – even though we could not fly out of the gate with a full renovation immediately.

So this method has been serving us well for a while now (holy cow, over seven years!) and we expect that nearly every room of our current house will have a multi-phase progression since we are planning to be in this house for a pleasant long time. We do not want to rush into anything without fully thinking it through and we’d like to save up for things that we truly will enjoy for the long haul. But that does not mean we have to live with old carpeting and wallpaper – and that we cannot toss up a little paint up, hang some art, update some light fixtures or faucets, and generally make the place feel fresher and more like us as we plan those larger scale undertakings and squirrel away some money.

In fact I think moving forward and experimenting within a certain space (not simply in your head or while staring at a picture in a magazine) is a truly helpful step when it comes to getting it right down the road with your major renovation. This was our first attempt at our first house’s bathroom. Scary, eh? But it turns out we had to paint the windowsill black and toss up a blue pashmina to learn that it was NOT what we liked (I thought it would be “so Domino magazine” and it was so… bad).

So we course corrected as we went, and ended up with a room that we could truly enjoy in the interim, which then led to a brand new bathroom that we enjoyed even more down the road. I guess one way to look at it would be that those small updates over time are like stairs. They build to a better result, and they bridge the gap between your before to your after. Without Phase 1 in here, we might never have arrived at that “enjoy it” Phase 2 result, which might now have led us to a “enjoy it even more!” Phase 3 outcome. So expecting to freeze at “before” and then skip right to “after” might not happen for everyone. But for us, that step-by-step approach over time simply seems to get us from point A to point C without as much stress as attempting to skip right from what we hate to what we enjoy in one fell swoop.

And sometimes it is remarkable to see how a few updates like paint, art, a window treatment, and a few accessories can bring an old room back from the brink without a major makeover down the line. Yes, in some cases a Phase 1 update can assist you see that you do not need to gut something at all (hello, money savings!) – and realizing that you can in fact work with what you have can be the equivalent of finding a thousand dollar bill in your couch cushion. Take our $51 guest bathroom mini makeover, for example. We had fairly much planned to work with this tile from the start (it was in strong shape and we thought the vintage yellow tone was charming) so we hoped this bathroom simply needed a few cosmetic fixes… but others who came over could not see how it would ever work without bringing in the sledgehammer.

All we did was paint, add a window treatment, hang some art, and remove some bad elements (like the mirror that reflected every guest’s full body while they sat on the toilet) but when the decorating dust cleared, even my mom was saying “you’ve made a believer out of me.”

So you might think a room needs a full gut job, but experimenting with some affordable for-now fixes might simply prove otherwise and save you a whole lot of money and effort down the line. And the only way to find that out sometimes is by diving into Phase 1. So if you wait and skip right to Gut Job, you might never know how charming a room can be with simply a few wallet-saving fixes. Our hall bathroom was a slightly more involved update than our guest room (we framed out the mirror and brought in a built-in shelf), but the tile was still in strong shape, so we got to work with nearly everything that was there already. Note: pardon the yellow cast on this picture, it was move-in day and I was rushing around shooting in the wrong mode.

After spending simply $168, we had a fully fresh looking room.

The cool thing about this method is that if Phase 1 does the trick, you are done! And you are likely thanking your lucky stars you did not go straight to full-reno mode. And if Phase 1 only serves to “tide you over” instead of majorly saving you from a bigger renovation, it is still a win because you get to smile more as you save up and percolate on Phase 2 plans down the line. Plus going through the thought process of Phase 1 can better assist you pinpoint what you still do not enjoy about a room (the layout, damaged tile, missing counter space, etc) and you get this bonus “learning experience” before jumping into any major construction down the road.

What about you folks. How do you balance your desire for a space that feels fresh and homey without blowing a bunch of cash you do not quite have? I am sure it is distinct for everyone, so I’d enjoy to hear what works for you. Do you do the ol’ freeze thing and simply try not to think about all the things that bug you? Or do you sprinkle in some inexpensive updates along the way? Do not get me wrong, we still have a bunch of rooms that we have been ignoring for months (cannot do ’em all at once!) but I like to think that those “we simply cannot take this anymore” moments are what assist us decide what needs a Phase 1 intervention most of all, and then we can dive right into that with some gusto.

Update – Wanna know where we got something in our house or what paint colors we used? Simply click on this button: