Project Budget Tracker

Estimated against actual, line by line

Seventeen rows and a total on the printed sheet, twenty in the spreadsheet where you can always add more, both with a difference column. The difference column is the useful one — not because you will do anything about it on this project, but because it is the only way to find out whether you under-estimate by 5% or by 40%. On the next project that number is worth real money.

The four lines people leave off

Delivery. Bulk aggregate, ready-mix and anything heavy carries a delivery cost, and ready-mix usually carries a short-load fee below a minimum volume. Ask before you order, because it can change whether bags or bulk is actually cheaper.

Tools you do not own. A tile saw, a plate compactor, a floor roller, a miter saw that will actually cut crown. Hire cost, or purchase if you will use it again. This is the line that most often turns a cheap project into a moderate one.

Disposal. A skip, a dump run, the fee on old carpet and underlay, the cost of taking away the packaging from forty boxes of tile. Strip-out generates a startling volume of debris.

Contingency, at 10 to 15%. Every renovation finds something behind a wall. Old wiring, a pipe where the plan said a stud, water damage nobody mentioned, a floor that is out of level by an inch and a half. Budgeting for it means finding it is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

How to use the difference column

Fill in the estimates before you buy anything — from the calculators for materials, from a quick search for everything else. Then fill in actuals as receipts come in, rather than at the end. Doing it at the end means guessing, and guessing is what put you here.

At the finish, look at which categories were furthest out. For most people it is not the headline material at all; it is the consumables — adhesive, fasteners, caulk, blades, sandpaper — which individually look trivial and collectively are not.

Keep it with the paint record

When you come to sell, or to insure, or simply to work out whether the kitchen is worth doing again, a filled-in budget sheet from the last project is the most useful document in the house. Keep it with the paint record card.