Everyone wants their project done yesterday. It is one of the most consistent truths of our practice: clients who have been living with a kitchen they dislike for ten years are suddenly in tremendous hurry once they have decided to change it. That urgency is understandable, and we take it seriously. But the projects that suffer most are the ones where the timeline was compressed at the start to meet an aspirational move-in date rather than a realistic one. Expectations set incorrectly at the beginning of a project create pressure that compounds through every subsequent phase, and that pressure rarely produces better work, it produces shortcuts, substitutions, and the particular regret of a homeowner who realizes, standing in a finished space, that they would have waited another three months if they had known what the difference would look like.
The design phase is almost always longer than clients anticipate, and it is the phase where extra time invested pays the highest dividends. For a significant whole-home renovation, a realistic design phase runs three to five months. That includes schematic design, design development, construction documents, and the iterative selection process for materials, finishes, and fixtures. The selections process alone, stone, tile, cabinetry, hardware, plumbing fixtures, lighting, flooring, is a major undertaking that typically involves multiple visits to showrooms, sample reviews, and coordination between materials that need to work together. At Lake Street Design Co., we build the selections process into the design schedule as a structured phase rather than treating it as something that can happen in parallel with construction. Decisions made under pressure during construction are rarely the right decisions.
Permitting is the phase that surprises clients most frequently. A straightforward interior renovation permit can be issued in two to three weeks in most municipalities. But a project that involves structural changes, additions, mechanical system upgrades, or lakeshore setback variances can spend three to six months in review, and occasionally longer. The watershed district review process adds its own timeline that operates independently of the local building department. We have had projects where the design was complete, the contractor was selected, and the client was ready to begin, and the permit sat in review for four months because a neighboring owner filed an objection to the variance request. These situations are not common, but they are not rare either, and a client who was told to expect a two-week permit turnaround is in a very different emotional state after four months than a client who knew from the start that the process could take that long.
Construction timelines depend enormously on the scope of work, but there are a few benchmarks that hold reasonably well across our project types. A high-quality kitchen renovation, custom cabinetry, new stone, new lighting, new appliances, runs eight to twelve weeks in construction, assuming all materials are on-site before the first wall comes down. A whole-home renovation of a medium-sized Lake Minnetonka property typically runs nine to fourteen months from construction start to substantial completion. New construction on a custom home runs fourteen to twenty-two months, depending on size and complexity. These numbers assume a good contractor with adequate crew, reasonable subcontractor availability, and no major surprises behind the walls. We always counsel clients to hold a contingency of ten to fifteen percent in both budget and timeline for the things that cannot be known until work begins.
Lead times for materials and fixtures are an increasingly important factor in construction scheduling, and one that the industry has been slower to adapt to than it should have. Custom cabinetry from our preferred makers runs twelve to sixteen weeks from order to delivery. Specialty stone that needs to be quarried and fabricated to custom dimensions can run eight to twelve weeks. Certain plumbing and lighting fixtures from European manufacturers run twenty to twenty-six weeks. If these items are not ordered before construction begins, which requires completed design documents and a finalized selections package, the project will wait for them. We now prepare a procurement schedule alongside the construction schedule for every project, mapping every long-lead item to the date it needs to be ordered in order to arrive when the project needs it. It is detailed, unglamorous work, and it is one of the most valuable things we do.