You do not have to pick your tile to get a price. That catches people off guard, and it is the piece of the process most homeowners have backwards. We can quote a whole basement or bathroom before you have chosen a single product, because materials get priced as allowances, and an allowance is a real number taken from jobs we have already finished. The deadline that actually matters arrives later, and it has nothing to do with pricing.
The First Selections Are Not Product Selections
At the first consultation we talk through what is going into the space. Tile here or LVP there. How many cabinets. How much countertop. Whether the shower is tile or engineered marble. That conversation happens during the scope process, and none of it involves picking brands.
I need enough to price the job. Are we tiling this floor or floating vinyl across it. How many linear feet of counter. Where the plumbing lands and what it feeds. That is the level of detail a real number requires.
People often arrive expecting to bring a Pinterest board and leave having committed to a specific product. It would slow the whole thing down if that were how it worked. The vision conversation takes an hour. Choosing an actual tile can take three weekends, and there is no reason to hold up a proposal while that happens.
Labor Is a Hard Cost. Materials Are Not.
Labor barely moves. Setting a shower pan takes what it takes, and the price does not swing based on which pan you eventually pick. The same goes for hanging cabinets, running trim, and most of what happens on a job site.
Materials swing enormously. A square foot of luxury vinyl plank runs from about a dollar to ten or more depending on where you land. Quoting that honestly before you have chosen anything is impossible, so materials carry an allowance instead.
An allowance is a placeholder with a real number behind it. We assume a figure per square foot for tile, per linear foot for counter, per box for flooring, and we build the proposal on those assumptions. You get a total you can make a decision against, months before you have set foot in a showroom. Who manages all of that is a separate decision, and we weighed it in hiring a general contractor or managing the trades yourself.
Where the Allowance Number Comes From
This is the part worth understanding, because it is where allowances go wrong on other people’s projects.
Ours are averaged from work we have already completed. Not a supplier’s list price. Not a national figure pulled off the internet. I take what a material actually cost across the last handful of basements and bathrooms we finished in Cache Valley, and that average becomes the allowance. On a recent job the allowance for large format shower tile landed at $8.61 a square foot, because that is roughly where the previous few had come in.
A low allowance is one of the oldest moves in bidding. Set the tile allowance at three dollars a square foot, win the job on price, and let the homeowner find out at the showroom that nothing at three dollars is anything they would put in their house. Every upgrade then arrives as a change order, and the bid that looked cheapest in January stops looking cheapest in April. If you are comparing proposals from more than one builder, the allowances are the first place to look, and comparing bids properly means comparing those numbers rather than the totals on the front page.
You Still Choose Everything
An allowance decides nothing for you. It is a budgeting assumption, and you are free to walk straight past it in either direction.
You go to the supplier and pick what you want. Seven dollar tile if that is what you like. Fifteen dollar tile if that is what you like. Come in under the allowance and the difference comes back to you. Go over it and the difference gets written up.
What I have watched happen, on nearly every project, is that price stops mattering the moment somebody sees the material in person. A client falls for a tile in the showroom, it lands well above allowance, and we go ahead anyway because they love it. That is worth knowing about yourself in advance. Treat the allowance as a planning tool, not a forecast, and book the showroom visit early instead of putting it off.
Going Over an Allowance Costs More Than the Difference
Here is the part that surprises people, and it is better to hear it now than in a change order.
When you choose above the allowance, the number that comes back is larger than the raw price gap between the two products. Everything that passes through our contract carries margin and delivery on top, the same as every other line on the job. We work on margin rather than markup, so it sits across the project as a whole instead of being stapled onto each individual product.
Nobody is charging you for changing your mind. The replacement gets priced the same way the original proposal was priced, using the same structure. What it does mean is that a tile costing four dollars more per square foot will not show up on your invoice as four dollars more per square foot, and homeowners are caught out by that all the time.
The Window Is the First Couple of Weeks
Once a proposal is accepted, the target is to have selections locked inside the first two weeks. Everything after that is ordering, and ordering is what the schedule is built around.
Cabinets go first, always. Windows too, on any job with a real window package. Those carry the longest and least predictable lead times, and everything downstream waits on them.
You can accept a proposal without having chosen anything. Plenty of clients do. I am not going to cancel a contract over unpicked tile, and there is no penalty in the paperwork for taking your time.
What Late Selections Actually Cost
We had a job in Providence where this played out cleanly.
I sent over a change order covering some plumbing parts that had gone above allowance, along with flooring. It sat for a couple of weeks before it came back signed. Once they signed and paid the deposit, they expected the work to happen more or less the next day.
There was still at least a week of lead time sitting between the signature and the installation. That week could not be compressed, negotiated, or worked around. Had the change order come back the day I sent it, that week would have run alongside work we were already doing on site and nobody would have noticed it. Instead it ran on its own, with the crew waiting.
Two weeks of deciding turned into three weeks of waiting, because the lead time that would have run quietly in the background had nothing left to hide behind.
Nothing Gets Ordered Until It Is Signed and Paid
This is the rule underneath all of it, and it is absolute on our jobs. We do not order material until the change order is signed and the deposit is in.
There is no version of this where I front the cost of a product you have not committed to. That is how contractors end up with a garage full of somebody else’s tile.
Once you understand that rule, late selections stop being a matter of a contractor nagging you and become arithmetic. Your decision date plus the lead time is your install date. Move the first number and the second one moves with it, every time, by exactly as much. Planning a remodel without going over budget is mostly a question of understanding which dates are yours to control, and this one is entirely yours.
If you are planning a basement, kitchen or bathroom in Logan, North Logan, Providence, Smithfield, Hyde Park, Nibley or Hyrum and want to see what allowances on a real proposal look like, that is a short conversation. You can request an estimate, read our published pricing, or look through projects we have finished.
