If you're here, you're starting to get serious about a whole home remodel, and one question is sitting in front of all the others: What's this going to cost?
In this blog, we'll cover what a whole home renovation costs in Vacaville by project level, what those numbers look like as a total budget, the factors that move your price the most, and the costs homeowners routinely forget to plan for.
A whole home renovation in Vacaville runs $150 to $600+ per square foot, depending on how much you're changing and the level of finishes you choose.
A lighter refresh falls between $150 and $225 per square foot. A mid-range remodel runs $225 to $350. A fully custom transformation starts around $350 and climbs past $600.
That's a wide spread, and it's wide for a reason. Repainting, re-flooring, and updating fixtures throughout a home is a fundamentally different project than gutting the kitchen, remodeling three bathrooms, moving load-bearing walls, and replacing every window.
Lermaxx Builders groups whole home renovations into three investment levels, separated by how deep the work goes rather than how big the house is. Here's what each one includes.
A refresh updates how your home looks and feels without touching the structure or meaningfully changing the layout. This is the right level when your floor plan already works, and the house just feels dated.
At this level, your renovation can include:
A mid-range remodel changes how the home functions, not just how it looks. This is where most whole home projects land. You're not just refreshing surfaces here. You're fixing the things about the floor plan that have bothered you for years.
Projects at this level could include:
A custom renovation is a complete transformation, with premium materials and a layout designed around how you actually want to live. At this level you're not making an older home feel new. You're making it feel like it was designed for you from the start.
Depending on the project, that includes:
Two identical homes on the same street can carry renovation budgets that differ by several hundred thousand dollars. Seven things account for most of that gap.
How much of the layout you're changing:
Keeping your existing walls and focusing on finishes is a different project than opening up the main floor. Structural reconfiguration adds engineering, framing, and beam work that cosmetic scopes never touch.
Kitchen and bathroom count:
These two rooms carry the highest cost per square foot in the house. A home with one kitchen and one bath is a very different budget than one with a kitchen, three baths, and a wet bar.
Cabinetry:
Refinishing existing boxes, installing stock cabinets, ordering semi-custom, and commissioning fully custom millwork span an enormous range. Cabinetry is often the single largest line item in a whole home renovation.
Finish level:
Laminate versus quartz versus honed marble. LVP versus engineered wood versus wide-plank white oak. Your selections can swing the budget 40% on identical scopes of work.
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing:
Updating an undersized panel, replacing failing HVAC, or re-piping is invisible work that homeowners rarely account for and almost always need.
Hidden conditions:
Once walls open, what's behind them is what it is. More on that below.
California renovation costs carry requirements that don't apply in most of the country, and they're a real part of a Vacaville budget. These are the ones worth knowing about before you set a number.
Title 24 energy compliance:
California's energy code can be triggered by the scope of your renovation, which may require upgraded insulation, high-performance windows, or HVAC changes you weren't planning on. Identifying this during design instead of during plan review is what keeps it from becoming a surprise.
Seismic and foundation work:
Solano County sits in seismic territory. Older homes may need foundation bolting, cripple wall bracing, or shear wall work, particularly once you start removing interior walls that were carrying more load than anyone realized.
Pre-1980 materials:
Homes built before roughly 1980 can contain asbestos in flooring, ceiling texture, or duct insulation, and lead-based paint. Testing and certified abatement are line items, and they're not optional.
Aging electrical:
Older Vacaville homes often have panels and circuits sized for a very different era of appliance load. A service upgrade is common on whole home projects.
Permits, plan review, and engineering:
Structural work means stamped engineering and a permit package. Plan review timelines and correction cycles affect your schedule, and we cover that in detail in [how long a whole home renovation takes in Vacaville].
The renovation number is rarely the full number. These are the costs that catch people off guard, and planning for them up front is what keeps a project from stalling halfway through.
Design and engineering fees
Permits and plan check fees
Testing and abatement
Temporary housing
Appliances and furnishings
Landscaping repair
A 10% to 15% contingency fund
Work through these before you start collecting bids. They'll make every conversation you have with a builder more productive.
We'd rather give you a realistic number early than a lower one that changes later. Lermaxx Builders is a licensed and insured California general contractor, and we price whole home renovations through a documented design-build process.
That starts with a conversation about your goals, your budget, and your timeline. Then we walk the property to take measurements, evaluate existing conditions, and find the issues that might not be obvious at a glance.
What you get back is a written scope of work with specifications, an estimated investment, and an anticipated schedule, so you can see what you're investing in line by line.
Once construction starts, that discipline holds. Selections are documented, changes go through formal change orders showing cost and schedule impact before you approve them, and job costs are tracked through JobTread so the numbers you see are the numbers we're working from. Every project carries a one-year limited workmanship warranty from substantial completion.
A whole home renovation in Vacaville runs $150 to $600+ per square foot. A refresh falls between $150 and $225 per square foot, a mid-range remodel runs $225 to $350, and a fully custom renovation starts at $350 and can exceed $600, depending on scope, structural work, and finish level.
A 2,000-square-foot whole home renovation generally runs $300,000 to $450,000 for a refresh, $450,000 to $700,000 for a mid-range remodel, and $700,000 or more for a custom transformation. Your actual number depends on how much of the home you're renovating and how deep the work goes.
Kitchens, bathrooms, and cabinetry carry the highest cost per square foot in the house, and structural reconfiguration is the fastest way to move a project into a higher investment level. Together, those four items usually account for the majority of a whole home renovation budget.
Ask your builder directly, because the answer varies. Design, engineering, permits, and plan check fees are real costs on any whole home renovation, and a proposal that leaves them out isn't comparable to one that includes them. We spell out exactly what's in our number in the written scope of work.
Renovating all at once is usually both cheaper and less disruptive. You pay for mobilization, permits, and design once instead of five times, the finishes and layout get planned as one connected home instead of five disconnected projects, and the disruption to your life is concentrated into one defined stretch rather than spread across a decade.
A whole home renovation is a chance to take the house you already chose and make it fit the life you're living now. The homeowners who love the result are almost always the ones who started with a real number instead of a hopeful one.
That's what we'd like to give you. Lermaxx Builders will walk your home, listen to what you're trying to accomplish, and put a written scope and investment range in your hands so you can decide from a position of information.
Start with our comprehensive cost guide to get oriented, then contact Lermaxx Builders to put those numbers in the context of your home.