Remodeling contractor · Plano
Whole-home remodeling in Plano
A whole-house project in Plano is the one moment when the plumbing question is cheap to answer. If the house dates from the polybutylene window, every wall being open at once turns a $4,000 to $10,000 standalone re-pipe into a line item, and it settles an insurance problem at the same time.
- A standalone whole-house re-pipe runs roughly $4,000 to $10,000
- Done while walls are already open, the marginal cost is far smaller
- Formal living and dining rooms are the square footage most worth reclaiming
One window to fix what the decade left behind
Room by room, a Plano house lets you defer the things that are not visible. The supply lines survive another bathroom. The formal living room stays formal. Take on the whole house and both of those stop being deferrable, which sounds like bad news and is mostly the opposite: it is the only time these problems are cheap to solve.
What is behind the walls
If the house was built between 1978 and mid-1995, polybutylene supply pipe is a live possibility, and a whole-house project is the ideal moment to deal with it. As a standalone job, re-piping a finished house runs roughly $4,000 to $10,000 because most of the work is opening and repairing walls. During a whole-house renovation those walls are already open, so what remains is materials and labor rather than demolition and repair.
The insurance dimension is the part owners tend not to know about. Texas carriers commonly exclude polybutylene claims, surcharge the policy, or decline to write it at all. A sudden failure is generally covered for the resulting water damage, but the re-pipe itself is treated as maintenance and is not. Resolving it during a project you are already doing is the cheapest version of that decision you will ever be offered.
What the floor plan gets wrong
These houses are not short of space. They are built around a formal living room and a formal dining room that most households now use a handful of times a year, while the kitchen and family room absorb everything. The whole-house opportunity in Plano is almost always reorganisation rather than addition.
That is a genuinely cheaper project than adding square footage, because the envelope, the roof and the foundation stay exactly where they are. Reclaiming two formal rooms as a study, a larger kitchen or a proper utility and mudroom usually delivers more day-to-day change than an addition would, at a fraction of the cost and none of the permitting complexity.
Nothing here is old. A good deal of it is exactly the wrong age.
Built from the late seventies through the nineties
Three decisions made before design
Three things separate a Plano whole-house project from the metro band, and all three are settled before design rather than during construction.
Whether the house needs re-piping
For anything built between 1978 and mid-1995 we establish this before design. It is not a reason to avoid the project, it is a reason to do it now: the marginal cost during a whole-house renovation is a fraction of the standalone number, and it resolves an insurability problem that only gets more expensive to ignore.
How many walls actually have to move
Truss-framed houses put a lot of the load on the exterior walls, so a surprising share of interior walls in Plano carry nothing. Where that holds, reorganising a floor plan is framing rather than engineering, and it is the single biggest difference between a Plano whole-house budget and a pre-war one.
Whether the envelope stays put
Reclaiming formal rooms costs a fraction of adding square footage, because the roof, the foundation and the exterior walls do not change and neither does the permit path. We price both where an addition is genuinely on the table, so you can see what the extra square footage actually costs against reorganising what you already have.
Real numbers, published
What a whole-house remodel costs in Plano.
The same published bands as the rest of the metro. What changes in Plano is what is behind the wall, and whether the house falls inside the polybutylene window is the single biggest swing in either direction.
Cosmetic through the house
$120,000–$190,000
Every room touched, no walls moved. Floors, paint, lighting, trim, both bathrooms refreshed and a full kitchen. The house feels new and the plan is unchanged.
What moves the number: How much of the flooring is continuous, whether the kitchen is a refresh or a rebuild, and how many bathrooms are in scope.
Walls move
$190,000–$300,000
Where most projects land
The plan changes. A load-bearing wall or two comes out, the kitchen relocates or opens to the living space, a bathroom is reconfigured, and the mechanicals are reworked to suit.
What moves the number: Structural scope above everything: how many bearing walls, how far the beam spans, and whether plumbing moves across a slab.
Down to the studs
$300,000–$400,000+
The house is stripped inside the envelope. New electrical, new plumbing, new HVAC, new insulation, new everything. Usually the right answer in a house that has not been touched since the eighties.
What moves the number: Whether the service and panel need upgrading, what the subfloor and framing look like once open, and how far the finish level goes.
Bands assume a house between roughly 2,000 and 4,000 square feet with the exterior envelope staying put. Additions and second stories are priced separately, because those are a different job with a different permit path. Concealed conditions are carried as an itemised allowance rather than padded into the headline figure, and unused allowance comes back to you.
Permits in Plano, and where heritage rules actually apply
For the overwhelming majority of Plano houses there is no historic review of any kind. The city has two locally designated heritage districts, Haggard Park and downtown, plus a set of individually designated heritage landmarks. Unless your address is one of those, remodeling here is an ordinary permitted job and the calendar is a permit calendar rather than a commission calendar.
That is worth saying plainly because it is the opposite of Fort Worth and Dallas, where the district question shapes the schedule. In Plano it usually does not, and anyone telling you otherwise about a 1985 house is adding a step that does not exist.
Permits themselves are ordinary and required for the real work. Altering plumbing, electrical or framing needs one. Replacing cabinetry, countertops and finishes inside the existing footprint generally does not. We pull whatever the work requires and the inspection dates go in your written schedule.
One Plano-specific note on re-piping. Replacing supply lines through a finished house is permitted work with inspections, and it is far cheaper to do while walls are already open for another reason than as its own project later. That sequencing decision is worth more than most finish choices.
Whole-home remodeling in Plano, answered
Do we have to move out during a whole-house remodel in Plano?
Is it worth re-piping the whole house at the same time?
Should we add on, or reorganise what we have?
The parts that are the same everywhere
How several rooms run as one sequence rather than a queue, why the structural question is answered before any finish is chosen, what living through it actually involves, and the full question and answer on cost across the metro all live on our whole-home remodeling page. This page covers only what is different about doing the work in Plano.
The permit rules, the review calendar and everything else that is true of the place regardless of which room you are doing are on the Plano page.
Also remodeling in Plano: bathroom remodeling in Plano, kitchen remodeling in Plano.
Get your fixed price.
Two quick steps. We already know it is a whole-house remodel, and the last step is the only place we ask for your number.
Step 1 of 2
Project: Whole home
The fear is not the price. It is being left mid-build.
These four commitments are in the contract rather than on a badge.
A fixed written price
The number we sign is the number you pay. It moves only through a written change order you approve before any work starts.
A named project manager with a cell number
One person owns your project from demolition to final walkthrough. You get their mobile number on day one, and they answer it.
A written update every Friday
Photos, what happened this week, what happens next, and whether we are on schedule, in your inbox before the weekend either way.
Broom-clean every evening
Floor protection down every morning, tools packed out and floors swept every night. You are living here while we work, and we work like it.