You can change your mind. I am not going to talk you out of it, and there is no point in a job where I stop taking changes. What it costs you depends entirely on one thing: whether the material has been installed yet. Before installation you are usually paying a restocking fee and some lost time. After installation you are paying for the same material twice, plus the labor, plus tearing out work you already paid somebody to do.
Nobody Is Going to Talk You Out of It
Let me put my incentive on the table first. The more a client changes, the more I sell. A change order is additional work at the same margin as the original contract, so refusing one would mean turning down business for no reason.
So there is no point where I say no. We could get to the end of a full remodel, and if somebody wants to pay for a second one, that is fine with me. We would treat it as a new job and price it the way we price any job.
The reason to think carefully about changes has nothing to do with my willingness. It is the calendar, and I will come back to that at the end.
If You Change Your Mind Before It Ships
The first thing we do is figure out what you want instead. Then I quote the replacement exactly as though it had been your first choice, using the same allowances and the same structure that priced the original proposal.
The awkward part is the material already on order. We try to return it, and sometimes that works cleanly. Often it does not.
A lot of what goes into a remodel is nonreturnable, particularly anything made to order or cut to size. Where a return is possible there is usually a restocking fee attached, and that cost lands on the client. I have no way to absorb it and no supplier who will waive it because somebody changed their mind.
What Happens to Material You Cannot Send Back
When something genuinely cannot go back, we have two options and neither of them is free.
The material is yours, so if you want it, it goes in your garage. People do take it sometimes. A box of tile becomes a future backsplash, or spare flooring for a room nobody has got to yet.
If you do not want it, we try to sell it secondhand and put whatever it fetches back toward the job. That works better on common sizes and standard finishes than on anything unusual. Either way the honest expectation is that most of that money is gone, and the replacement gets ordered as though the first one never happened.
After It Is Installed, the Number Changes Character
This is a different conversation, and it is worth understanding before you are having it.
Once something is in, changing it means paying for the material a second time, paying the labor a second time, and paying for demolition on top. That last one catches people, because removing finished work is real labor that produces nothing visible when it is done.
Tile is the expensive version. Clients do see a tile installed, decide it is wrong, and want it out. I have watched that happen more than once. Pulling set tile off a shower wall is slow, messy work. It frequently damages the substrate underneath, and that has to be rebuilt before any new tile goes anywhere near it.
None of that makes it a bad decision. If you are going to look at a wall for fifteen years and hate it, tearing it out is probably the right call. Just make the decision knowing the arithmetic instead of finding out afterwards.
How a Change Order Actually Gets Written
The process is the same whether the change is four hundred dollars or fourteen thousand.
We walk through what you want changed and build a scope from it. I write that up in our project management software and send it over. You get to read the scope, see the price, and take as long as you want with it. If you are happy, you sign it there in the software and it becomes part of the contract.
There is a $250 administrative fee on a change order, and it sits on top of the materials and labor rather than being buried in them. Everything else is priced the way any job is priced. Planning a remodel without going over budget covers how to hold money back for this in advance, which is the version of this problem you can solve before it happens.
Fifty Percent Up Front, and Why
Once a change order is signed we invoice fifty percent of it. The balance is due either when that scope is finished or at the next progress draw on the project.
The reason is overhead. A change order pulls material, subcontractor time and scheduling attention forward, and all of that gets spent before anything is installed. Carrying it on my books until the end of a job means funding a client’s upgrades out of working capital. That is a good way to run out of working capital.
The rule underneath is short and it explains most of what goes wrong on other people’s projects. We do not order material until the change order is signed and the deposit is in. No signature, no order. There is nothing adversarial about it. That is just how the money works.
The Real Cost Is the Calendar
Here is the part I would tell a client before any of the pricing.
A change order adds time even when everything goes smoothly, because the replacement material has a lead time and that lead time starts the day you sign. We had a job in Providence where a change order covering flooring and some plumbing parts sat unsigned for a couple of weeks. Once it came back signed and paid, the client expected installation almost immediately. There was still a week of lead time to get through, and by then it had nothing to run alongside.
Two weeks of deciding became three weeks of waiting. Not because anyone did anything wrong, and not because of a fee. The sequence simply could not be compressed once it had been pushed out of the schedule it was meant to sit inside.
And It Goes Both Ways
One more thing, and most contractors will not say it out loud.
Your change orders move your schedule. Other clients’ change orders can move it too. Somebody on another job adds two weeks of tile work, and the tile setter who was coming to you on the fifteenth now arrives on the twenty second. Nothing in your contract prevents that.
That cuts in your favor as often as against you. Another client’s delay is the reason a subcontractor is sometimes available earlier than planned. But you should know that a remodeling schedule is a shared resource across every job a contractor is running, and anybody promising you dates that ignore that is telling you what you want to hear. Projects run long for ordinary reasons far more often than dramatic ones, and this is one of the most ordinary.
If you are planning a basement, kitchen or bathroom in Logan, North Logan, Providence, Smithfield, Hyde Park, Nibley or Hyrum and want to understand how changes get handled before you sign anything, we can go through it. You can request an estimate, read our published pricing, or look through projects we have finished.
