Why Dollars Per Square Foot Lies
The classic shortcut is to multiply total square footage by a single rate. It fails because cost is not distributed evenly across a house. Kitchens and bathrooms carry plumbing, electrical, cabinetry and tile, and they routinely cost five to ten times per square foot what a bedroom costs.
A twelve hundred square foot house with two bathrooms and a gut kitchen is a completely different budget from a twelve hundred square foot house with one bathroom and a kitchen that only needs paint and hardware. A single average rate treats them as identical, which is why deals get underwritten badly.
This calculator prices by room and by grade, so the expensive rooms are visibly expensive and you can see instantly which decision is moving your total.
Finish Grade Is A Business Decision
Rental grade means durable, replaceable and cheap to repair, chosen on a replacement cycle rather than a taste preference. Retail grade means it needs to photograph well and survive an inspection by a buyer who is emotionally invested. High end means the fixtures themselves are part of the value argument.
Installing retail grade in a rental usually destroys money twice, once at purchase and again when a tenant damages something that costs three times as much to replace. Installing rental grade in a retail flip costs you more than it saves, because buyers read cheap finishes as evidence of what they cannot see behind the drywall.
Set the grade per room, not per project. Kitchens and primary bathrooms often justify a step up while secondary bedrooms rarely do.
- Rental grade: LVP, stock cabinets, laminate tops, satin paint
- Retail grade: quality LVP or tile, semi custom cabinets, quartz
- High end: hardwood, custom cabinetry, stone, designer fixtures
- Mixing grades across rooms is normal and usually correct
What The Range Does Not Include
Structural work, foundation repair, roofing, full electrical rewires, sewer laterals, mold and asbestos remediation, permits and architectural fees are not in these numbers. They are site specific, wildly variable and impossible to estimate without a look at the property.
Nor is holding cost. On a flip, months of interest, taxes, insurance and utilities can equal an entire kitchen. If the schedule slips because of a permit, the rehab budget was never the real risk.
Carry ten to twenty percent contingency on a cosmetic rehab and more on anything involving a house older than fifty years. The contingency is not pessimism, it is the price of the things nobody can see from the driveway.
How To Use The Number In A Negotiation
The high end of the range is the number to underwrite with. The low end is the number to celebrate later if you hit it. Deals fail on the difference between an optimistic budget and an actual one, so use the pessimistic figure to decide what you can pay.
When bids come back, compare them line by line against the range rather than against each other. A bid far under the range is usually missing scope, and the missing scope reappears as a change order at a worse moment. A bid far over may be a contractor who does not want the job, which is useful information too.
Bring the itemized version to the conversation. A contractor arguing with a specific line about cabinet linear footage is a productive argument. A contractor arguing with a single total is a negotiation about nothing.
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