I've wondered that myself. Our kitchen projects now take time because it's strictly DIY on the weekends. But our first Kitchen was done in 2 weeks. We both took vacation for the two weeks, and worked on the kitchen when the kids were at school (snuck out for some golf too). We had all the cabinets (bought second hand) and the laminate counters were ordered ahead of time with our measurements. The only thing we didn't do ourselves was the floor, but I scheduled that ahead too.

This current one has been more like:

One weekend to do the demolition.
One weekend to do the electrical & plumbing roughin
One or two weekends to hang the drywall
One or two weekends to finish the drywall and paint
One or two weekends to hang the cabinets
One weekend to set the countertops (tiled) & backsplash (grouting later)
One weekend to do the floors & move in stove, fridge, & dishwasher.
One weekend to do the trim and any touchups.

If you are younger than us (and have more energy) you can probably do it quicker. Also if you are living in the house, you can probably get it done quicker by working on it during the week too.

You've nailed the #1 issue. The #2 issue is probably availability of materials. Ordering everything in advance is a great idea, if you've got some place to store it. Other than that, you're always waiting on something to come in.

And then there's the fact that while the remodel is your #1 priority, it's not going to be your contractor's #1 priority at all times. Your job is important to him, but it won't always be at the top of his list. A GC works on lots of jobs at once, and everything needs to flow with the right order of trades. Rather than use a sub that he hasn't used before if one of his other jobs gets behind, he'd rather delay a bit and get the quality of work he's used to. I'm sure that it's annoying to have the plumber be a day late on your job because he's all the way across town fixing a leaking toilet one of the contractor's other jobs. But, if it's your leaking toilet, you're the one happy about his priorities!

Remodeling is NOT a straight line. It's more like string theory. The other end is out there, but the route can be circuitous at times.

Barbcollins, we'd consider hiring things out more then we've done in the past just to get things moving faster...it just doesn't sound like things move much faster with the GC.

Thanks for clarifying that we should be diligent in making all the decisions we can think of to at least not have that delay the project. I don't see any reason to hire a GC if things aren't going to go a lot smoother then most do. I understand the reasoning behind their decisions but I don't want to pay the extra $$$ to have my project put on the backburner...we can do that for free.

It takes so long because though most of us believe we're done with decisions, and are working with a GC, in reality we've left something undecided. We may have not fixed the backsplash yet, and when we do, it will take 4 weeks to get, or we change our mind about going with dual fuel, and that brings another trade into the picture, etc.

And, once demo starts, your contractor discovers that the ball and tube wiring from 1910 is still in place and needs to be removed, and you need a new electrical panel to manage the extra lighting you want to install. Been there.

I don't think any GC wants to drag out a project. Every day they are at your house, they are losing money. Most want us to make decisions, so they can move to the next project.

I know what you mean. Definitely having all the decisions made makes things go somewhat faster. That was our plan as well. All the decisions are made (at least the ones we know we need to make!) and we're now three weeks into our reno.

Even though our GC really is doing his best to stay on track there are just delays and things that take time. Delays while we wait for the city engineers to help us sort out the best way to fix the scary structural issues that we uncovered when the drywall came down. And just like LWO mentioned, delays while we wait for all the various subs and trades to get time to come and give us their quotes (while demolition continues) and do their work. Demolition had to be mostly finished and some of the framing done before the cabinets could be site measured. Our local cabinet maker puts their orders in once a week and our order wasn't ready in time after the site measurement for her to put in right away. One more week delay. Once the order is in it takes another 8 weeks for the cabinets to be made and arrive. Hopefully the majority of the plumbing, electrical and framing/drywalling can be done during this time (we're doing our whole main floor, not just the kitchen). Then the couple of things that we weren't planning on doing initially but that make sense to do while we're at it ... Then the time to get the base cabs installed before the counters can be templated. Then the fabrication time before the counters can be installed. Don't forget the 2 weeks over Christmas and New Years when absolutely nothing happens (we're not DIYers). Then all the various finishing ... installing the appliances, backsplash tiling, casings, finishing the plumbing and electrical work, touch up painting etc.

Sometimes it all seems so painfully slow to me, but then I look around and see how much has been done and it seems to really be going well ... I guess there's really more to do than it seems after all is said and done. It's just time consuming.

Because that's just how long it takes.

People have become accustomed to the gotta have it now mentality of the internet world and their expectations have been skewed by by the remodeling pron they watch on HGTV.

Big projects do not get done in an hour or even over the weekend that these shows portray. The quality level of that work is not there either. Another thing you don't see in those shows is the army of staffers behind the scenes running to get that 3 3/4" bolt from the depot to finish hanging the mirror because the host threw it away or broke it. There is also the haranguing of subs on price and more importantly schedule with the promise that they'll BE ON TV. They go in all doe eyed and don't want to blow their chance by not staying every nite till 1:30 AM to finish that elect. outlet or drain.

Your sub is not going to do that, no way no how. You need that bolt? Contractor drops what he's doing to go get it and no work at your place for an hour - often two. Multiply this out by the 6274 piece in a kitchen and you can see where it starts to add up.

Also remember life happens to the people and products on your project. Contractor's kids get sick, their mom dies, truck gets a flat or blows a head gasket. Cabinets co.s misplace the order and it's delayed for 2 weeks, their trucks get caught in snowstorms or floods, appliance manuf. change their specs mid production and don't tell anyone so your water line is in the wrong place.

It's just a complicated business with tons of processes and parts involved.

A few ideas in no particular order...

I think the old rule ''the final 10% of the job takes 50% of the time" is one reason a kitchen reno takes so long.

We did not slow down the process for even a second because of changes to the plan or decision making problems. All materials were on site when the job began and more or less all decisions had been made.

As a newbie to reno, I thought that installing the cabinets would be the most labor intensive part of the project. In fact, installing the new cabinets was the quick part.

Doing the demo on our 1928 kitchen also took a surprisingly long time; even with a crew of four men, it took three very long days because of the plaster and existing floor to ceiling tiles.

If it isn't planned well, getting the rough inspections (plumbing, electrical, insulation) can set one back a week or so here or there.

How long the reno takes also depends on how many finish carpenters are on the job. We had only one finish carpenter. Doing an excellent job cutting and installing a new frame for a door or window could take him the better part of a day. Tiling the backsplash took a full day with two men working on it; grouting took another day. Installing a new subfloor took a day; the new hardwood floor took two men at least a couple of days. Finishing it in place took even more time. It took one of the workers almost a whole day to put wood putty in all the trim nail holes in the kitchen and then touch them up with a paint brush.

It all adds up!

Our whole reno took so long -- 4 months -- because we also did two bathrooms, a new roof (and roofline) and a new covered back porch. Each bathroom took almost as long as the kitchen because of the large amount of tile. For half the project we had a crew of two men; for the other half a crew of 4 men who worked ten hour days, sometimes 7 days a week, with smiles on their faces. I was in awe of them!

IME what takes time is, as you mentioned, making decisions. And a GC can't make your decisions for you. Wait, they can I guess - it's just that if you're on here, it's a good bet you don't want him/er to.

So what's to be gained from hiring someone who can't relieve the lion's share of the burden?

Especially when it seems you're familiar with another huge piece they could potentially provide: experience. We have no GC and I am constantly making mistakes because others make mistakes and I don't even know it. I would know it *next* time; I would know it if I had done this before. sigh. But this doesn't sound like your situation at all.

Decisions. Scheduling. Life.

oh well.

These are ALL excellent & informative answers. I'm so impressed with the level of knowledge here on GW.

My hubby is a GC, & everything described here applies. I KNOW that with my CH being fully scheduled for 3 solid months, delays are not something he wants or needs. But if he finds something or a supplier or one of his subs has an issue, there's gonna be a delay. He builds in delay time cause he KNOWS it's gonna happen with so many variables in the process, but it'll still gonna happen. MY GC hubby does not ALWAYS sub out. It just depends. He's fully qualified to do it all, but depending on time, complexity & availability, sometimes he does it himself & sometimes he doesn't. He is there EVERY day that the project is ongoing & is probably THE most detail oriented person ever. He want sto do the job right & with pride so that the homeowner can have pride & satisfaction of the investment made!!! I always tell clients that patience is a virtue & to take a deep breath, but I also know it's easier said than done!!!

~Jeana

because s- - - happens. for my project the schedule impacts were due to errors made by the trades. the cab maker subcontracted out the cabinet finishing and the guy completely screwed up to the point the doors had to be completed re-fabricated from scratch if you can believe that. that caused a good 4-6 week delay. then the countertop fabricator screwed up the job and the counter had to be completely redone including re-sourcing of stone, re-templating, refab and install. that was another 4-6 week delay. any slip ups you incur the initial schedule delay to re-do the work and then ususally more delays as you have been pulled out of the queue and need to wait your turn to get back in the queue. your project is not the only one going on as mentioned above. GC or no GC, S--- happens. prepare as best as you can but be realistic - most projects experience issues that will require extra funds and time to remedy. allow +10% and mentally prepare for some delays. if neither are needed you can celebrate.

It doesn't always. You are more likely to hear about the ones with lots of delays here because people who had delays are on longer and usually the problems causing delay are posted about. Our main kitchen remodel 5 years ago took 2 months 10 days from start of demo to final inspection.

It mostly went pretty smoothly. We had acoustic ceiling stuff removed and redone with what was suppose to be a smooth paint job. When the ceiling was painted it wasn't smooth enough - so an extra week was spent doing more plastering and repainting. We started in November so there was over a week with no work when we were out of town and the workers were taking time off for holidays. There was a two week lull between templating and granite installation because the granite takes time to fabricate. Then drilling the holes for the faucets and stuff had to wait a few days because I was out of town on a business trip and we all felt that I needed to be there for the final decisions on that.

So if there was no holiday period and things went perfectly it could have been done in about 6 weeks instead of 10. Friends who aren't as picky and basically just turned the job over to the GC have had their kitchens completed closer to 6 weeks. Our GC was excellent at scheduling. He had his jobs planned and enough workers who could do more than one thing (like plumbing and electrical) so work there weren't any delays waiting for workers to be available.

More recently, our flooring and family room reno. The demo and prep for floor replacement took a lot of work because the prior engineered floor had been floated over the base for the kitchen tile. That took a few days of jack hammering to demo. It was replaced with a very flat sub-floor. Once that was done, drywall repaired from the paneling that was taken down and paint dried. There also was a slight delay because we had to wait for the hardwood flooring to arrive. Then it had to sit in our house for a week to acclimatize.

My husband, is GC. And lots of things may come up that may not be for seen. Sometimes it is the home owner, that will change things then wonder why the job is taking longer. Yes there are some people like this. He, gives them a time line, but will tell them, up front he, will not cut corners to get a job done if something unexpected comes up. They like this and he, always calls his clients back three weeks after the job,is done to see if everything is okay.

When you've hired it out, what makes the project go on and on and on?

I asked my contractor BIL and neighbor ... the #1 unnecessary reason for endless projects is that the home owner keeps changing their mind or can't be persuaded to make a choice on a critical feature.

Every time the contractor has to ask a question, things STOP until the question is answered. The more detailed your plan is - in writing, signed by all concerned - the fewer in-person consults have to be done and the fewer "but I thought you were going to ___" issues have to be dealt with.

#2 is not having "Plan B" in case a critical component is no longer available. If your imported Patagonian art glass tile vanishes from the marketplace because Argentina dock workers are on strike, if the granite slab of your dreams shattered when the fabricator loaded it ... how fast can you find a satisfactory replacement? How flexible are you?

Then you get into the uncontrolled and "unexpected" issues like removing drywall to find: no studs, dry rot, termites, or the need for better support. With these, you just deal with them.

I hate to sound like one of those old people who want to talk about the "good old days", but once upon a time, just about everybody had some hands on experience with working on their home. It was an expected part of owning your own home. You didn't call a plumber for something basic. You went down to the hardware store and bought the washers to fix the leaky faucet. You ran a new electrical circuit to be able to have an outdoor light.

While there are a lot of people who still manage to do that or more today, there is a significant number who have never even tried to paint a room. They don't understand the complexity of a simple job that HGTV skims over in fast motion so it seems to take 5 seconds rather than 2 days. Doing home projects takes time. It is a process that must be done in sequence, not all at once with every trade in there doing subpar work on a complete home "makeover". TV isn't real life, and too many have never experienced real life except by watching the TV. Home renovations only seem to last forever to those who have never done any home projects themselves.

Of course, then there are the issues you find out during demolition and the mistakes that you the homeowner and your trades will make. The only surety that you can have for a remodel is that it will cost more and take longer than you think it will.

Even for those well experienced with renovations and budgets for the same can be surprised. We're doing a sunroom renovation to be able to make it part of our home instead of an oven attached to our home. We expected it to take a long time and cost us plenty, and I had planned it all out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know what I forgot to budget for? High quality fasteners. Stainless steel screws cost a LOT more than galvanized ones! I won't bore you with why we need stainless for a portion of the project, but I will say that you can't think of everything, even if you have years of experience doing renovations. Multiply that "oops" by the number of people working on your home, because everyone has at least one brain fart per job. And that's how you end up $500 over budget and two weeks longer than you expected. That's just everything going right! LOL!

Its not always the homeowner's fault that projects take so long. I had everything purchased and onsite, but my project took longer to do because GC started a more lucrative (expensive) project at the same time.

My house sat empty days at a time because he didn't schedule any of the subs - one of the subs told us what was going on. Due to the slump in remodeling we had very little wait for inspections, but a few inspections failed because GC or his second string carpenter tried to take short-cuts. That caused him to redo the work which then added additional time.

Greendesigns, you had me with - "Of course, then there are the issues you find out during demolition and the mistakes that you the homeowner and your trades will make. The only surety that you can have for a remodel is that it will cost more and take longer than you think it will."
...but you lost me at the $500 over budget part. That would be truly funny if it were not painfully way too low. Try thousands upon thousands over budget. Of course, our reno involved more than a kitchen, but the overages were for many reasons. One of which was our gc trying to a la carte us to death. We had our master bedroom extended and yet he felt the need to charge extra, after contract, to re-set up the cable in the same bedroom. I can go one with many more examples, but that one illustrates well.

Another reason is just about everyone who touched our job did something major wrong. The cabs were delivered shy 13 cabinets (big delay). Someone threw out the below the counter parts to our faucet. The architect drew our plans without going all the way into the stand up attic and assumed a whole section of the house had beams running in one direction when they went another way. The mistake was not figured out until our roof was ripped off, in Dec., no less. That lost us another month (and a lot of money). The sink leaked, the dw leaked, the icemaker leaked, the electricians screwed up the bathroom vent fan. They messed up the thermostat and heating (took weeks to sort out and still is not right). They installed the eyebrow window wrong and it took weeks of arguing and troubleshooting to try to rectify what was done. The cab installers made the island the wrong height and then damaged a cover panel. The counter guy mismeasured the island counters and had to remake them (6 month delay!). The gc's guys installed the vent for the kitchen in the wrong place, then at the wrong height, twice, and now it only functions as a light and I can bang my head on it if I am not careful. The house had rot in the sills which was discovered when the back of it was torn off. Our doors were delivered in the wrong sizes and one was warped. The flooring company sold me the wrong products so they ended up failing after installation and will be redone soon. Our propane line was installed to the wrong location so we got rejected on our c.o.s and can't hook up our stove yet (10 months and counting).
To put it mildly, nothing went well the first try. If all had been done properly and professionally, it could have been done much sooner and with less stress and closer to budget. It seems like the good gcs are less prevalent based on speaking to others who renovate locally and gw these days.... In theory, a gc should make a project go smoother and faster.

Somehow a few words were missing from my post. The last paragraph should have started: More recently, our flooring and family room reno took 1 month from demo to final inspection.

I'm sure that homeowner delays in decision-making is a big factor. In my experience GC'ing my own DIY project with the occasional sub, it's also due to a second simple reason: you work much harder on a project if it's your own.

When I had electricians and carpenters in for a week or two at various points, I would work alongside them on my own pieces of the project. Invariably, they took longer breaks and arrived later or broke off work much earlier than I did. (In fact, I believe I slightly irritated some of them by not taking more breaks or stopping everything to chat for 20 minutes at a time.) Perhaps I was unlucky with my guys -- although I was very happy with the high quality of their work, no complaints there, they were all very friendly and we got along extremely well with no miscommunications. But on average, their daily workday on my house was easily 2 or 3 hours less than mine. I very rarely saw anyone work a full 8 hours on my project, even the ones who I know were only working for me that week.

I can ascribe some of this to supply-running and project-juggling, but I think it's just reality that folks who do this for a living are going to pace themselves slower than someone who's completely focused on getting 'er done. My assumption is that they have to, or they'll burn themselves out.

My experience; your mileage may vary.

The one time we had a huge master bedroom remodel done, we hired a WONDERFUL contracter who we haven't been able to find again for this project :(

He put in a full day and did everything himself. Everything he did was perfect! Not only all tha,t he finished the project early. He set the bar very high especially when I read story after story of cost overruns, GC subs not showing up etc. I thought my GC was good but now I realize he was a diamond in a rough. He wasn't the most expensive but actually toward the bottom 1/2 in cost.

Obviously my expectations to hire my kitchen out would be high after having had such a positive experience. I don't think I'm comfortable with the confrontations many of you have had with your GC due to problems that they created. I just wouldn't want to deal with it and I know my DH wouldn't.

We've got a very strong work ethic and I expect the same from someone I am paying to do a project. I remember a time we had a warranty issue with our siding and they hired someone to come out to reinstall it. He'd come for 4 hours or so a day and want to talk for 1/2 of it. That lasted about a week until I called the office and said it just wasn't going to work. He said the installer was having a hard time finacially and so he gave him the job and my response was we'd be finacially strapped too if my DH didn't put in a full day of work. They did get a new crew. I can't imagine having to deal directly with the GC about a situation like this.

Deciding on a GC would be the hardest decision of all the decisons that need to be made.