The Real Cost of Skipping Space Planning Before You Renovate
Nobody wakes up excited about space planning. They wake up excited about the tapware, the tile, the colour of the cabinetry. I understand that completely — I do the same thing. But across every project I have worked on, I have never once seen someone regret spending time on the plan, and I have lost count of the people who regret skipping it.
The trouble is that the cost of skipping it never arrives as a single line on an invoice. It arrives in pieces, over months, disguised as other things: a variation, a return, a bench that felt fine on paper, a hallway you turn sideways in for the next twenty years. This post is my attempt to add those pieces up.
First, what space planning actually is
Space planning is deciding where everything goes and how you move between it, before anything is bought or demolished. Where the fridge sits relative to the bin. How wide the gap is between the island and the oven when both doors are open. Whether the toilet is the first thing you see when the door swings. Whether there is anywhere to put a bag down when you walk in the front door with your hands full.
It is not the same as a mood board, and it is not the same as a set of construction drawings. It sits between the two, and it is the bit most people skip because it does not photograph well. A layout plan has no colour in it. It is the least Instagrammable stage of any project and the one that decides whether the finished room works.
I said something in a project submission last year that I keep coming back to: a key part of my practice is layout planning and solving awkward floor plans, because good design starts with how a home functions day to day. That is not modesty about the pretty part. It is the order the work has to happen in.
The numbers are worse than you think
I am not going to pretend planning makes a renovation cheap. It does not. But the research on where blowouts come from is unusually blunt about the cause.
The ABC spoke to architecture professor Anthony Burke about why building and renovation projects blow out, and his three big cost levers were managing time, managing size, and minimising design changes on the fly. His advice was simple enough to put on a fridge: “the single best thing you can do when starting a project is to do the cost-cutting up front.” The same piece cites cost overruns on nine out of ten large projects, averaging 28 per cent, and tells residential clients to expect to spend roughly 20 per cent more and take over 20 per cent longer than planned. You can read the full piece here.
Notice that two of the three levers — size and design changes — are decided at the planning stage, and the third one is largely a consequence of them. Nothing about that list is about choosing a cheaper tile.
Cost one: paying for the same decision twice
This is the most expensive one and the least visible. Plumbing and electrical go in early. If the sink moves after the slab is poured or the wall is sheeted, you are not paying for a sink — you are paying a plumber to come back, a sparky to come back, a plasterer to patch, and a painter to finish. Four trades, four site visits, for a decision that cost nothing to make three weeks earlier on paper.
The version I see most often is the appliance one. Somebody buys a 900 mm cooktop after the joinery is drawn for 600. Or an integrated fridge is swapped for a French-door model that needs another 200 mm and a different hinge clearance. Each change is small. Each one ripples through the cabinet run either side of it, and joinery is the single most expensive thing in most kitchens.
Cost two: the variations nobody quoted for
Burke has a phrase for this in that ABC piece that made me laugh out loud, because I have sat through it a hundred times: “what-if-ing” the design. What if Aunty Judy comes to stay? What if we have another baby? What if we want to sell in five years?
What-if-ing is not planning. It is planning’s evil twin. Planning narrows the options down to the one that suits how you actually live; what-if-ing adds scope for a life you are not living, usually while the builder is standing there with a saw. His other line is the one I would tape to the site fence: changing details late because you saw a different bathroom scheme in a magazine stresses out your builder as well as your wallet.
Real space planning kills what-ifs early and cheaply, because you have already tested them on paper and decided. A plan is not a restriction. It is a record of decisions you have already made, so you stop making them again at the worst possible moment.
Cost three: furniture that never fits
This one lands after the renovation is finished, which is why people rarely connect it back to the plan. The room is done, the trades are gone, the budget is spent, and now you are trying to buy a sofa for a wall that is 2.8 m long with a doorway 400 mm from one end. There is no good sofa for that wall. There was, for the version of that wall that never got drawn.
Furniture is not a decorating problem. It is a dimension problem, and dimensions belong on a plan. If you know the sofa is 2.4 m before the wall is built, the wall gets built to suit it. If you find out afterwards, you buy something too small and live with a room that feels like a waiting area. I wrote about the specific version of this in living room layout ideas, because living rooms are where it bites hardest.
The returns are the visible cost. The invisible one is worse: most people do not return the wrong sofa. They keep it, and they shuffle around it for years.
Cost four: a beautiful room that ruins the house
Rooms are not renovated in isolation, but they are almost always planned in isolation. So the new ensuite gets bigger, and the walk-in robe it borrowed the space from stops working. Or the kitchen island grows by 200 mm, and the walkway behind it drops below the point where two people can pass.
Circulation is the thing nobody budgets for because it is the space where nothing happens. It is also the space that decides whether a home feels calm or annoying. A room can be perfect and still make the house worse, and you will not see it on a single-room plan — only on the whole floor.
Cost five: the one you only notice at 7am
Not every cost is financial, and this is the one people write to me about years later. The bin that is three steps from the chopping board instead of one. The pantry you cannot open while the dishwasher door is down. The bedside table that will not fit because the bed had to move 300 mm to clear the wardrobe.
None of it is a disaster. All of it is a small tax you pay every single morning, forever. I have said before that having the right storage in the right location matters more than the sheer quantity of storage, and I stand by it — a badly placed cupboard is not storage, it is furniture you have to walk around.
The reason this hurts is that daily friction is exactly what planning is best at fixing, and it costs the least to fix at that stage. It is free on paper. It is a demolition after handover.
What good planning looks like when the walls cannot move
Here is the part that surprises people. Most of my published work did not move a single wall.
At Evergreen in Clayton South, the kitchen is roughly 3.9 × 2.9 m and the budget was about AU$25,000. The sink and electrical positions were already fixed, so the layout stayed exactly where it was. What changed was everything measured: the bench went from 600 to 700 mm deep, the island from 900 to 1000 mm, the dishwasher moved closer to the sink and freed up storage for baking trays and chopping boards, and spice drawers went in on both sides of the cooktop. The client bakes, so the island had to stay clear and be as big as possible. None of that is structural. All of it is planning. You can see the whole thing in the Evergreen kitchen transformation.
At the ILK apartment in South Yarra, updating the layout was not an option at all — it is an apartment. The kitchen was removed and redesigned in the same service locations, and the improvement was purely in workflow and where the storage sat.
That is the argument for planning in its purest form: the constraint was fixed, so the only lever left was thinking. It is also the cheapest lever anybody has.
Where I would actually spend the planning money
I am obviously not neutral here, so take this with the appropriate pinch of salt. But the honest ranking, if your renovation budget is tight:
- Layout first. It is the only decision that constrains every decision after it.
- Then the things you touch daily. Tapware, handles, the bench you lean on.
- Then the things you look at. Tiles, paint, splashbacks. These can be changed later. A wall cannot.
If you have a plan and something about it feels wrong but you cannot name what, that is exactly what Fix My Floor Plan is for — you send me the plan and the problem, and you get a layout recommendation back. If the questions are broader than one room, or you are still deciding whether to buy the place at all, a design consultation covers the whole picture in ninety minutes.
And if you would rather do it yourself, that is completely fine — the Kitchen Layout Dictionary walks through fifty layouts with the sizing and workflow reasoning behind each one, which is more than I can fit into a blog post.
The weekend version, if you do nothing else
You do not need software. You need masking tape and an afternoon.
Tape the new layout onto the existing floor at full size — the island, the vanity, the bed, the walkway. Then live in it for two days. Walk the path you walk at 7am with a coffee in one hand. Open the imaginary oven door and see what it hits. Put the bin where you have drawn it and see how many steps it is from the chopping board. Get a second person to walk past you while you stand at the tape line that is the bench.
It looks ridiculous. It is also the single highest-value two hours in the entire project, and every problem it finds is free to fix. Every problem it does not find becomes a variation.
The short version
Skipping space planning does not save you money. It moves the cost to a point in the project where it is four times more expensive, and hides it inside variations, returns and small daily annoyances so you never see the total.
Tiles can be changed. Paint can be changed. Where the wall is, and where you walk, cannot — not without paying for the whole thing twice. If you want more of this sort of thing, the kitchen design mistakes post and this bathroom layout before and after are both layout problems wearing finishes as a disguise.
Still not sure what’s right for your own place?
That’s the part I do — and there are two ways in, depending on how much you need sorted.
Fix My Floor Plan — $297 a room. Send me your floor plan and a few photos. I’ll tell you what I’d change: where the furniture goes, what’s making the room feel awkward, and the practical next steps to fix it. Back with you in 5–7 business days, and there’s not a single meeting involved.
Or a Design Consultation — $550. Ninety minutes on your whole space: layout, colours, materials, joinery, storage, or just a second opinion before you commit to something expensive. Online, wherever you are in the world.
