What Does a Home Plus Cost?

Estimating costs for your home plus or residential group home remodel.

At Kansas Code Plans, many of my clients have been saving for years to open their own business; but until you actually experience the entire process of opening a home you never really know how much it costs. In this blog I will help Kansas Business owners prepare and plan for the expected costs to opening a home.

The first step is to have a business plan that factors in the number of residents you’d like to have and the rent you can charge them. Second, you need to determine what the costs are to run your business, staffing, food, supplies, utilities, mortgage, and profit to pay yourself. Once you have a business plan, it’s time to start looking for a home and to develop a budget to sustain your new business until your home is open and full of residents. What is hard to plan for though, are the costs associated with bringing your new home up to code in order to get licensed and move in residents.

In 8 years of working on home plus projects, I’ve only ever seen 2 or 3 move in ready homes, and that’s because these homes were previously used as a group home or home plus and were up to code. However, I have seen many homes that were previously a home plus that still needed remodel work because the house had been previously approved so many years ago that it wasn’t correctly reviewed and approved back in the day, and the State Fire Marshall will not allow the new owner to move in until things are fixed.

The number one repair we see in every home is a simple one, replacing bedroom doors. Home pluses are required to have a solid core wood door, with a lever latch, and a closer. No typical residential home has these 3 items, so we always replace the doors to bedrooms, at a cost of $200-$300 each on average. Furthermore, in many homes, we have to enlarge some or all bedrooms doors to 3ft wide, was well as the door to the main hall bathroom, enlarging a door typically means patching floors, painting, new trim, and moving a light switch, so factor in another $500 or so for each door enlargement. And finally, about 75% of older homes need to have their bedroom windows enlarged to meet egress requirements. In a home without a sprinkler, the bedrooms must have a second means of escape, and this is almost always a window. We open each bedroom window and measure its clear open width and height, and do a little calculation to make sure it passes. Most windows don’t, so we typically replace one window per bedroom with a crank out type window, or horizontal slider window, to meet requirements. Plan on about $1,000 per window. Although, sometimes you can find an off the shelf window for just a few hundred, and depending on install cost, you might be able to replace the window for as little as $500.

Every home with 4 or more residents must have a fire alarm system, this includes smoke detectors in every room that connect to a central system, with horn strobes in the home and pull stations at the exits. Prices on fire alarm systems have gone up considerably since Covid; pre-covid a system was $5,000-$7,000, but they’ve doubled post-covid to $10,000-$15,000 on average, and I’ve seen systems cost as much as $20,000 for very large homes. Time and again, I see bids on fire alarm systems that vary WIDELY in price, I always recommend that you get a minimum of two fire alarm bids, and three bids if you can.

The second most expensive upgrade to a home, and one we often try to avoid if we can, is installing a sprinkler system. Homes of 9-12 residents must have a sprinkler system, homes of 6-8 residents often can get a variance to not install a sprinkler, and homes of 5 or less aren’t required to have a sprinkler. Sprinkler systems are hard to estimate because it really depends on the size and complexity of the home. Sprinkler systems never cost under $20,000, and often cost $25,000-$30,000 on average, and can cost as much as $45,000 or so. Now you see why we avoid sprinklers. Some owners who do sprinkle, open an 8-person home and operate it for a few years before remodeling the garage and adding sprinklers to go up to 12 residents, you just need to do the math to learn if the cost of the sprinkler will get paid for by 3 extra residents. It can be worth it, just proceed with caution. If you are on city water with strong pressure, that’s a good thing. If you are on rural or well water, you might have issues and a very expensive system.

Another remodel item we see in most homes is remodeling the main hall bath for the residents use. Most remodels at least replace the tub with a walk-in shower, and some remodels refinish the whole bathroom. Costs also vary widely depending on the size of the bathroom, the extent of work, and the quality of the materials chosen. If hiring it out, a bath remodel typically starts around $10,000, is about $15,000 on average, and can be as high as $20,000.

Last but not least, the biggest of them all, the garage remodel. I’ve designed about 40 garage remodels to add bedrooms, laundry, storage, offices, and new bathrooms, and like everything else, we’ve seen costs go up and up post-covid. Let’s run through the average garage remodel features first; the first decision to make is are we leaving the garage doors in place, or removing them and infilling the opening with a new wall and windows. The second decision is, are we building a raised floor so that the floor level is the same as the house, which we frequently do since most garages are 12”-18” lower than the main home. Then we decide how many bedrooms we want, and if we want a new bathroom or not. Some homes with a small main bath, like to build a nice spacious bath and shower room in the garage, some homes don’t build one at all if they’ve got enough bathrooms already. And lastly, how do we heat and cool the garage rooms, do we extend the home's existing HVAC, do we add a new furnace in a small closet, or do we install the wall-mounted mini-split systems that are becoming more and more popular? All of these things can really add to the cost of a garage remodel. I would never budget less than $60,000 for the most basic simple garage remodel and would only budget that low if it was bedrooms only (no bath) and very simple HVAC work, and possibly no raised floor. However, it’s much safer to set your budget at $100,000 for your average remodel of 2-3 bedrooms and a bathroom and/or laundry room with a raised floor. Unfortunately, that $100,000 can easily be exceeded, depending on your contractor, garage remodels lately in the Wichita area have been costing $140,000-$160,000. These prices are for quality work, good materials, and nice rooms with big windows. Talk to as many contractors as you can, I know of several remodels where the contractor was very low in price and they did the work well below $100,000, just know that low prices can be low for a reason.

So there you have it, these are many, but not all, of the costs we see with newly converted homes. Others we didn’t cover include building a ramp(s), new flooring, tearing out a wall between living areas to create a larger open space, kitchen remodels, or tearing out bedroom closets to enlarge bedrooms.

Here’s a rundown of all the costs I mentioned…

Door replacement… $200 - $300 each

Door enlargement… $500 each

Window replacement… $500 - $1,000 each

Bathroom remodel… $10,000 - $20,000

Fire Alarm… $10,000 - $15,000

Sprinkler System… $25,000 - $40,000

Garage remodel… $100,000 - $140,000