FREE Home Renovation Project Plan Template

Master home renovation project planning timelines with our intuitive home renovation project plan Gantt chart template.

Why use our Home Renovation Project Plan Template instead of Excel or Google Sheets?

Get started with our Home Renovation Project Plan Template in seconds while skipping the hassle involved with Excel or Google Sheets.

Build Gantt charts in minutes, not hours.

No project management experience? No problem. Tom's Planner offers a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that's intuitive and easy to learn. Creating Gantt charts is a breeze, saving you time and effort. Compare that to the time-consuming, frustrating, manual formatting-intensive process of building a Gantt chart in Excel or Google Sheets.

Move at the pace of modern business with no learning curve or Googling formulas.

Good luck figuring out how to make a Gantt chart work in Excel or Google Sheets. Excel’s user manual weighs in at a hefty 500+ pages. It takes just five minutes with Tom’s Planner to start planning your first real project plan.

Headache-free collaboration and sharing.

Tom's Planner offers powerful options for sharing and collaborating on Gantt charts, including public links, PDF exports, and team access with customizable permission levels. It’s never been easier to communicate or ensure everyone’s on the same page. Compare that to Excel, where sharing and collaboration mean jumping through hoop after hoop and dealing with confusion and chaos.

How to use Tom’s Planner’s home renovation project plan template to build and share your renovation project.

Getting your project off the ground is as easy as 1-2-3.

Click the 'start with template’ button to open the Home Renovation Project Plan Template.

Register for a free account and watch a short video on using Tom’s Planner. The account is free forever, with no strings attached.

You’re all set to use the Gantt chart template. Need additional help? Our AI assistant can create a custom Gantt chart Home Renovation Project Plan Template based on your project description.

What is a home renovation project plan?

Home renovations can help create environments that better suit your lifestyle, growing family, or usage needs. They let you tailor the space to you, rather than forcing you to live in a home that reflects someone else’s ideas. Whether you’re building an addition, finishing out that basement, adding an outdoor kitchen, or completely remodeling the interior, it’s an exciting process.

However, there’s a lot that can go wrong. That’s where a home renovation project plan comes in. This document is precisely what it sounds like — a written plan that dictates what you’re doing in the renovation, who’s handling it, when it will be finished, and a great deal more. It’s all about turning that daunting, stressful renovation project into something much more easily managed.

Why a Gantt chart is essential for your home renovation success

Do you truly need to use a home renovation project plan Gantt chart template? Couldn’t you do the same thing with a spreadsheet? Yes, you could come up with a home renovation project plan template in Excel or create your own Google Sheets home renovation template. The problem is that neither of those tools was developed with this sort of task in mind.

Instead, a Gantt chart gives you access to customizable fields and functions, provides a better overview, and doesn’t come with the same headaches that Excel does.

Some of the most common fields you’ll find within a home renovation project plan include the following:

• Tasks and subtasks
• Task completion percentage
• Project hours
• Task duration
• Payment schedules

With a flexible Gantt chart like Tom’s Planner, you can customize those fields to fit your unique needs and the project’s specifics. Some of those may include:

• Inventory and allocation for materials and supplies
• Names, contact information, and tasks assigned to subcontractors
• Expenses tracked against a schedule of values
• Key milestones in the project

When to use a home renovation project plan Gantt chart template

Any home renovation project can benefit from using a renovation project plan Gantt chart template at key points and for specific reasons, such as:

A Gantt chart can help ensure that you can plan your home renovation project effectively. You can clarify the sequence of events, establish a project timeline, and allocate resources.

Submitting a bid for a home renovation project? A Gantt chart can help you provide greater clarity for potential clients, ensuring that you land more jobs and build a thriving business.

Resource allocation during home renovation projects is always challenging. A home renovation project Gantt chart allows you to allocate resources like labor, materials, and supplies, and then adjust them in real-time.

Who should use a home renovation project plan?

While general contractors and subcontractors should certainly use a home renovation project plan, homeowners undertaking DIY renovations should also have a formal, detailed project plan in place.

A general contractor can use a home renovation project Gantt chart in several ways. One of those is to coordinate between subcontractors and other teams. They can also effectively manage deadlines and communicate with the client and other stakeholders.

Subcontractors must synchronize their efforts with other tradespeople. A home renovation project Gantt chart allows them to plan their labor and materials, as well as time their efforts accurately.

Clients benefit from using a home renovation project plan Gantt chart in several ways. For instance, they can stay up to date on the project’s progress. They can also monitor the status to inform finance-related decisions.

The top three pitfalls to avoid when planning a home renovation project plan?

Home renovations can be incredibly rewarding. They can also go very wrong. The following tips will help ensure that your project goes to plan.

1. Not planning effectively: Perhaps the single most important pitfall to avoid is not planning effectively.. You must go into the renovation project with a clear vision of what you want to achieve. This will help you communicate that vision to your contractor(s), who will then help turn it into a reality. Solution: Be as specific as you can when creating your home improvement project planner template. Rather than saying, “I’d like to add another bedroom to the house, and install tile floor in it”, consider, “I’d like to add a 15’ x 15’ bedroom off the existing living room. It should have travertine tile flooring throughout.”
2. Not being realistic with your budget: Most home renovation projects are derailed not by supply-related issues or failure on the part of a contractor, but because the client didn’t have a realistic budget. Jumping headlong into an extensive renovation without a good understanding of the total cost is a great way to end up with sticker shock. Solution: Sit down with your contractor at the very beginning and rough out a final figure for your home remodel project plan template. But also stay flexible, because that number is just an estimate. It can and likely will change.
3. Focus on renovations that add utility before value: There’s a lot of focus on the return you get from different renovations. Kitchens and baths are rated among the best returns out there while swimming pools and sunrooms don’t necessarily command a high ROI. Solution: Here’s the thing — it’s your home. It should reflect your wants and usage needs, rather than what you think a buyer might want to see in the home in 10 years when you finally decide to sell it. Yes, you should have some idea of what you can expect in terms of ROI, but don’t let that be your deciding factor.

What does a home renovation project plan include?

The beauty of a home renovation project plan is that it can include anything you want. It’s your project, so customize the template to suit your needs, goals, and budget. However, while every renovation project is unique, home renovation project plans tend to have a lot of shared items, including:

1. Scope: First, make sure that your home renovation project plan includes the full scope. This should discuss the entire project, from beginning to end, including materials, goals/objectives, and more.
2. Timeline: When will the project start? When is it predicted to wrap up? What are the major milestones within the project?
3. Costs: Your home renovation project plan should certainly include the final cost, but it also needs to include a breakdown of that number. This includes the costs of materials, labor, permitting, and everything else.
4. Involvement: Who’s involved in your project? The template should list the general contractor, subcontractors, inspectors, and others who play roles in getting your renovation done.
5. Materials/Supplies: All renovation projects require supplies and materials. This includes things like nails and screws, sheetrock, lumber, and more. A detailed supplies and materials list will help ensure that the right items are purchased and used and will also help prevent disputes when the project concludes.

Four tips on how to make sure you reach your deadlines

It’s not uncommon for home renovation projects to straggle along, with missed deadline after missed deadline. Thankfully, that doesn’t have to be your fate. Use these three tips to help ensure you reach your deadlines.

You can’t meet deadlines if you don’t set them. Work with the contractor (or the client, if you’re the contractor) to set deadlines during the planning and ideation stage. You’ll need a good idea of what the project will entail and the availability of materials and supplies, as well as the permitting and inspection processes, but you can usually rough out key milestones this way.

You must hold your team accountable. Don’t let delays or no-shows go unchallenged. That doesn’t mean you need to be belligerent, but accountability goes a very long way toward reaching milestones and delivering a project that everyone can be proud of. Note that this does require that subcontractors be accountable to the contractor and have a large degree of transparency throughout the project.

Create a timeline at the beginning of the project. This should include key milestones, as well as the tasks dependent on those milestones. The timeline should be flexible to account for unforeseen circumstances, but it will provide structure and guidance throughout the entire project.

The single most important tip to ensure a successful home renovation project is to plan accurately from the very beginning. Use a home renovation project plan Gantt chart to create visual guides that will help ensure you can stay on time and budget.

Gantt charts in Tom's Planner vs in Excel

Excel	Tom's Planner
Cost	License required	Free version available
Learning curve	Hours	Minutes
Create your first Gantt chart	Hours	Minutes
Making an update in your chart	Several minutes	Seconds (drag & drop)
Sharing charts with others	At some point you will save and email a file titled: version_4_def_usethisversion_reallyfinal.xlsx	Online, one source of truth, always up to date, with no confusion
Look & Feel	Messy	Clean, polished and professional
Dependencies
Filtering
Zoom in/out
Automatic Legend
AI-assist		Let our AI assist do the work for you
Export to image or pdf	Requires workarounds to export	One mouse click

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