Editorial Policy

Last updated September 14, 2026.

Renovate and Plan publishes house plan reviews, renovation case studies and room design guides. This page sets out who writes them, how they are put together, and the rules we hold ourselves to. If something here is not being honoured, write to editor@renovateandplan.com and say so plainly.

Who Writes Here

Every article carries a byline and links to a full author page. There are no guest posts, no ghostwritten placements and no articles credited to a generic “team”.

• Theo Caldwell — renovation designer and plan strategist. Writes the house plan reviews: circulation, structure, what a drawing will cost to build and where it will fight its owner.
• Nora Whitfield — interiors and exteriors editor. Writes the renovation studies, the room design guides and the essays.

Both author pages list background, areas of work and how to reach them directly. Reader questions about a specific article go to the author who wrote it.

How an Article Is Built

Plan reviews start with the drawing itself. We read the floor plan room by room, check the circulation and the structural spans, note what the elevation is doing to the massing, and then say who the plan actually suits. We say what we would change before anyone builds it. A plan review is an opinion about a drawing, not a structural certification.

Renovation studies take one starting condition and follow it in several directions, so the reader can compare decisions rather than admire a single result. Each direction carries its own cost range and its own maintenance consequence.

Room guides work from materials and specifications: the finish, the brand line where it matters, the dimension that makes the layout work.

Costs, Figures and Sources

Cost ranges are turnkey estimates at current Hudson Valley and wider Northeast labour rates for the year stated in the article. Each article says what the range includes and excludes. They are written to help you read a contractor's quote, not to replace one. Prices move with material markets and with your own site conditions, so treat every figure as a starting point for a local bid.

Where an article relies on a code requirement, a manufacturer's specification or published research, it links to the primary source. Preservation guidance, building science and installation requirements are cited to the body that issued them, not to another blog.

Images

Many of the before-and-after studies are digital visualisations produced for this site: one real starting condition rendered in several directions so the same footprint can be compared fairly. They illustrate design decisions; they are not photographs of finished client projects and are not presented as such. Product and plan images provided by manufacturers or plan publishers are used with their permission. Every image carries descriptive alt text.

How We Use AI

Research, outlining and editing tools are part of how this site is produced, as they are at most publications now. Every article is directed, fact-checked and signed off by the named author before it is published, and the judgement in a review — what works, what fails, what it costs — is theirs. We do not publish unreviewed machine-generated text.

Independence

We do not sell editorial coverage. No manufacturer, builder or plan publisher pays for a mention, a position in a list, or a favourable review, and none of them sees an article before it is published. Advertising is sold programmatically and is kept visually separate from the writing. Affiliate links are labelled where they appear and explained in the affiliate disclosure. If a commercial relationship ever affected the substance of an article, the article would say so at the top.

Corrections

We correct errors of fact rather than quietly deleting them. Send the article URL and what is wrong to editor@renovateandplan.com. We aim to reply within three business days. A correction that changes the substance of an article is noted in the article itself with the date; a typographical fix is made silently. Articles that are substantially rewritten carry an updated date.

What We Will Not Publish

• Sponsored content presented as editorial.
• Structural, electrical, plumbing or code advice offered as a substitute for a licensed professional's judgement on your actual building.
• Reviews written from a press release rather than from the drawing or the project.
• Content scraped, spun or republished from another publication.

Reader Comments

Comments are read by a person before they appear. We publish disagreement, including disagreement with us, and remove abuse, personal information and link spam. Comments are not a substitute for professional advice, and we do not vet the claims readers make in them.