Complete Home Remodel in Encino
A complete interior remodel of a single-family home in Encino. The owners wanted a clean, modern house: a white kitchen with a waterfall island, bathrooms in dark stone, and a living room built around a feature fireplace wall.
Project at a glance
| Location | Encino, CA |
| Project type | Whole-home interior remodel |
| Rooms | Kitchen, bathrooms, living room, flooring throughout |
| Scope | Demolition to studs, framing and subfloor repairs, electrical and plumbing rough-in, drywall, kitchen cabinets and quartz waterfall island, marble bathroom tile, floating vanities, slat-wood fireplace wall, new flooring and doors |
Down to the studs
The interior was stripped back to framing so the electrical and plumbing could be rerouted for the new layouts. The kitchen photos show the subfloor and framing before anything went back in.
The kitchen
White shaker cabinets with a marble-look tile backsplash, a dark island wrapped in a quartz waterfall top, and under-cabinet lighting. Cabinets were set first, then the counters, then the tile.
The bathrooms
The primary bath is finished in large-format black marble-look slabs with a fluted wood vanity; a second bath got a double vanity with backlit mirrors. Both use floating vanities to keep the floor line clean.
The living room
The fireplace was rebuilt as a full-height black stone surround flanked by a vertical slat-wood wall that hides the TV wiring.
Why the order of work cannot be rearranged
A whole-house remodel is not a set of room projects running side by side. It is one sequence with hard dependencies, and most of the frustration homeowners experience comes from expecting parallelism that the work does not allow.
The order is roughly fixed: demolition, then any structural work, then rough plumbing, electrical and mechanical in that order because they compete for the same wall and ceiling cavities and the largest pipe wins, then inspection, then insulation, then drywall, then a long finishing phase, and only then flooring, cabinets, stone, and paint.
- Nothing closes before inspection. The rough inspection is a gate. If a trade is not finished, the inspection does not happen, and everything behind it waits.
- Drywall is the pivot. Before it, changes are cheap. After it, every change means opening something that was just closed. The decisions that need to be final before drywall are the ones people most want to defer.
- Stone waits for cabinets. Countertops are templated from installed cabinets, not from drawings, so there is an unavoidable gap of a week or two in the middle of the finishing phase.
- Flooring timing depends on the material and on whether it runs under the cabinets. That is a decision, and it has to be made early because it changes the sequence.
What “complete remodel” means for the permit
There is a threshold that surprises people. Small projects are permitted as what they are — a bathroom, a kitchen. Once the scope crosses into substantially reworking the house, the permit takes in more of the building, and requirements that would not apply to a single room can be triggered across the whole house: insulation and energy requirements, smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms throughout, and sometimes upgrades to systems nobody intended to touch.
That is not a reason to avoid the scope. It is a reason to establish it at design stage, because the difference between a project priced as several rooms and one priced as a whole-house remodel is not just the square footage.
Live in it or move out
The honest arithmetic: staying is cheaper in rent and much more expensive in time, dust and friction. Moving out is a real cost and it compresses the schedule, because trades can work in more of the house at once and there is no need to make the place habitable at the end of each day.
The middle path — staying while the work moves through the house in zones — works when there is a functioning kitchen or bathroom at all times, and stops working the moment the schedule requires both to be down together. Whichever way it goes, the decision belongs in the plan rather than being made under pressure in week three.
Before, during and after
Related: Whole-home renovation · Remodeling in Encino · Kitchen remodeling · Bathroom remodeling
How a whole-home remodel in Encino is sequenced
A whole-home remodel is phased so plumbing, electrical and HVAC are opened once while the walls are down, then closed up and finished room by room. Encino adds two local factors: hillside lots that need engineering, and parcels in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone where exterior materials are prescribed. Our whole home renovation page sets out the per-square-foot budgeting tiers and the timeline of roughly two to five months of construction plus one to three months of design and permitting; whole-home renovation cost goes into the numbers, and our Encino page covers the local permit process.
Questions about whole-house remodels
Can I do it in phases to spread the cost?
You can, and it costs more overall. Each phase carries its own mobilisation, its own permit process, and its own disruption, and work done in phase one is sometimes disturbed by phase two. Phasing buys cash-flow relief, not savings — which is a legitimate reason to do it, as long as it is understood.
How much of the budget should be contingency?
More on an older house than a new one, because opening walls in a house of any age reveals things. What matters is that the contingency is a named line in the budget rather than optimism. A proposal with no allowance for the unknown is not a cheaper project, it is a less honest one.
What actually causes delays?
In our experience, in order: decisions not made by the date the schedule needed them, long-lead items ordered late, and plan check. Site problems are real but less common than the other three. The single most useful thing a homeowner can do for their own timeline is decide finishes early and stick to them.
Should I change the layout or keep it?
Keeping the plumbing walls where they are is the largest available saving in a whole-house remodel. If the layout genuinely does not work, change it — that is what the project is for. But changing it because it is on the table is how budgets go.
More whole-home renovation work, the renovation cost guide, and our Encino service area page.
Thinking about a similar project?
A whole-home remodel is design, engineering, permits and construction in one sequence. We run all of it under one contract with one project manager. Green Design and Build is a licensed residential general contractor (CSLB #1110975) based in Van Nuys. We reply within one business day.