About Renovate and Plan

Renovate and Plan began as a set of private notes kept while reviewing plans on behalf of clients getting ready to renovate — Hudson Valley farmhouses, Brooklyn brownstones, a handful of Vermont capes. Every client asked the same three questions: does this plan actually work, what should we change before we touch a wall, and what is this renovation realistically going to cost us in friction over time? Every time, the answer became the same long pre-flight note. By the end of 2024 that note had become a template. By 2026 it had become a site.

Hundreds of plan reads later, those templates are the 153 articles you find here — plans walked through, renovations led, rooms designed. The site is a working notebook, not a brand or a firm. We write for owners trying to understand their own home before they renovate it, builders looking for a second eye on a plan before they swing a hammer, and other designers comparing how the rest of us read circulation: one plan, one renovation, one honest decision at a time.

What you won’t find here: stock-photo staging, sponsored posts dressed up as editorial, vague “top tips” that were never tested in a real project, or affiliate-driven hype. What you will find: specifics — the plan number, the room in square feet, the brand and spec line, the structural trade-off — because that is the only kind of design writing we would trust from the reader’s side of the desk.