10 min read
Last updated November 2026
In the summer of 1989 my family built a log cabin for my grandparents. Three attorneys, a high school teacher and a Superior Court judge. I was fourteen, and I watched those five capable men waste thousands of dollars in building materials trying to work out how to frame one dormer window. I also watched my dad fall off the third floor roof he and I were working on together.
Smart, careful, hardworking people. That is the part worth holding onto, because the choice in front of you is not about who is competent. It is about who carries the risk.
There are three ways to remodel a home in Phoenix. You can do the work yourself. You can hire the lowest bidder. Or you can hire a design-build firm that designs the project and builds it under one agreement. These are not three levels of quality. They are three different answers to a single question: who absorbs the cost when something goes wrong. In the first two, the answer is you. In the third, you are paying a company to carry it for you.
That is the whole comparison. Everything below is detail on how each one works and what it asks of you.
Last updated November 2026
More often than a remodeling company will usually admit.
The City of Phoenix publishes the line, and it is clearer than most people expect. Painting does not require a permit. Neither does adding or replacing flooring, or replacing existing plumbing fixtures in their existing locations, or minor repairs to non structural elements like trim and hardware. A kitchen where the cabinets and fixtures go back in the same places with no new electrical and no structural change does not require a permit either. If that describes your project and you have the weekends, do it yourself and keep the money.
The line moves the moment the house changes shape or the systems move. Phoenix requires a permit for wall removals, for room additions, for electrical rewiring and additions, for gas line modifications, and for moving or adding a sink, a toilet or a tub. The city publishes its own list of which residential projects need a permit and which do not, and it is worth reading before you start rather than after.
Three things sit on the other side of that line that almost nobody mentions.
The owner builder exemption is narrower than people think
Arizona law does let you build or improve your own property yourself. It attaches two conditions. The work has to be intended for occupancy solely by you, and the property cannot be intended for sale or rent for at least one year from the date of completion or the certificate of occupancy. If you remodel the kitchen yourself and list the house eight months later, you are outside the exemption. That is a real consequence and it does not announce itself until closing.
There is no warranty on your own labor
The manufacturer still warrants the product you installed. Nobody warrants the installation. If the tile fails because of how it was set, that one is yours.
The state's consumer protections do not apply to you
When a licensed contractor does the work, you can file a complaint with the Arizona Registrar of Contractors within two years of occupancy or of the last work performed, and depending on the damages you may be able to apply to the Residential Contractors' Recovery Fund for up to $30,000 to have work corrected or completed. When you do the work, there is nobody to file against. When you hire an unlicensed person, there is also nobody to file against, which is the part that catches people.
Doing it yourself is a legitimate choice. It is the wrong choice when the project moves plumbing, opens structure, or has to pass an inspection you have never sat through.
I was that person.
In 2000 Lorrie and I decided to start our own company and had no money to do it with. My younger brother, maybe a year out of college, called and offered to loan us $2,500. That paid for the technical trade exam and the business management exam Arizona requires to become a licensed contractor, and there was enough left over to cover the license application and the first two years of the license fee. We were licensed, with two years to prove we belonged.
Pay attention to which exam Arizona makes you sit. Not just the trade one. The business management one. The state understands something the industry does not talk about much, which is that construction companies almost never fail at the craft. In more than thirty years in this trade I have watched good companies with excellent tradesmen close their doors, and it was the business that failed every time, not the work.
So when you get a low number from one person working out of a truck, understand what you are actually looking at. He may be an outstanding craftsman. I have worked alongside tradesmen whose work I could not match. What he is carrying is sales, estimating, ordering, scheduling, production, billing, collections and warranty, all of it, alone. That is not a character problem. It is a capacity problem, and it produces the same two outcomes almost every time. He disappears from your project to chase the next sale, because the next sale is the only thing keeping the lights on. And the number was too low to begin with, because nobody was tracking whether it covered overhead.
One more thing worth knowing before you read another advertisement. To hold an Arizona contractor license you must carry a bond. With the exception of workers compensation, the Registrar of Contractors does not require a contractor to carry insurance in order to be licensed. So when an ad says licensed, bonded and insured, that is three claims and the state only stands behind two of them. Ask for the certificates. A company that has them will send them the same day.
Because a bid comes in low when something has been left out. An incomplete scope, low material allowances, or a schedule that assumes nothing goes wrong. Those gaps do not disappear. They come back as change orders once the work has started and you are already committed, and the low number climbs past the realistic one you set aside.
We wrote a whole page on why the lowest bid costs more, including a short video, because it is the single most expensive decision a homeowner makes. If you are holding three proposals right now, read that one first.
Design-build is a method where one company handles both the design and the construction of your project under a single agreement. Instead of hiring a designer or architect first and then bidding those plans out to separate contractors, you work with one team that draws the project, prices it, and builds it. One agreement, one price, one company accountable from the first sketch to the final walkthrough.
The practical effect is that the person who promises you something during design is on the same team that has to deliver it during construction. There is no gap between the drawing and the build for a problem to fall into, and no second company to point at. In our case that person is Lorrie, who leads our design team, sits in on about three quarters of in home consultations, and has been doing this for more than twenty four years. She starts with how you actually live in the house rather than what you saw online. Our design-build page walks through the method in more detail.
This is the question the three approaches actually answer differently, so it is worth seeing them lined up.
| Approach | Who designs it | Who prices it | Who carries the risk | Where it tends to break |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | You | You, as you go | You, all of it | At an inspection you did not know you needed, or at resale |
| Lowest bidder | You, usually from a photo you found | He does, often below his own cost | You, because there is no depth behind him | When he vanishes for three weeks, or when the change orders arrive |
| Design-build | A designer on the project team | The same company that will build it, before you commit | The company | At the front end, because design takes real time and is paid work |
The same project, three approaches. The work is similar. The exposure is not.
Who absorbs the cost when something goes wrong
The same mistake, three approaches. The bar shows who pays to put it right.
Our read from 500+ Phoenix remodels, not a quote. Bar lengths are illustrative.
Here is what carrying it means in practice, in our case. If we measured wrong, ordered wrong, or built something off the approved plan, correcting it is on us and it never becomes a change order. If we open a wall and find something nobody could have seen, you hear about it the same day, in writing, with photos and a price, before we touch it. We do not use allowances and we do not use contingency funds, because a placeholder number lets a proposal look finished when it is not. Typical change orders on our projects run $2,000 to $5,000, and a structural discovery can exceed that.
Two currencies, and most people only price one of them.
The first is money. A kitchen remodel in Phoenix runs roughly $75,000 to $200,000 depending on scope and finish level, and our kitchen remodel cost guide breaks down what moves a project from one end of that to the other. Doing it yourself removes the labor from that number and adds your weekends. The lowest bid removes something else from that number, and you find out what during construction.
There is a cost to our approach and it belongs in the open, because it is the number most firms leave out of a comparison like this. We charge for design. Our Project Development Agreement is typically five percent of the midpoint of your investment range, or $15,000 to $25,000 on larger projects that need engineering and architectural plans. It is non refundable and it credits toward your project when you build with us. We would rather charge to get the number right than hand you a low one that grows once the walls are open.
The second currency is time, and it lands on whoever in the household is least able to say no to it. That cost never appears in a proposal.
Three specifics, because specifics are the only truthful way to answer this. Our remodeling process page lays out the whole sequence.
Your schedule is confirmed three times before a trade shows up
We color code every task. Red is tentative. Yellow means we have confirmed the subcontractor's availability once your start date is set. Green means we confirmed again two to three weeks out, on availability, scope, and the time the work will take. Green means go. Our weekly look ahead planning targets two full weeks of green tasks at all times. We cannot expect a subcontractor to be sitting by the phone waiting for our call, so we are the ones who have to be proactive.
We hold floor protection one inch off the wall
That sounds like nothing. Here is why it matters. When we install new wood flooring we cover it with Ram Board and tape the perimeter down with one hundred percent coverage, so a rock cannot work its way underneath and get ground into your new floor over three weeks of traffic. And we hold it an inch off the drywall so the new baseboard lands on wood instead of on tape, which leaves the painters room to caulk the baseboard down to the floor. The average approach is red rosin paper thrown down, tacked at the corners, and tape left under the baseboard that you will see for as long as you own the house. Nobody will ever notice we did it the other way. That is the point.
We do not run the blame game
On a small bathroom addition, our drywall pro stayed until seven at night to finish the texture so he would not hold up the schedule, and left the corners uncaulked because the texture had to dry first. The painter arrived the next morning and refused to work until someone else came back to fix it. I had stopped for fast setting caulk on my way in. I caulked every corner in eight minutes and it was ready to paint five minutes later. Thirteen minutes, while he stood and watched. The paint crew finished that bathroom early the same day. We stopped working with that painting company, and I told the owner myself, and I opened by telling him the quality of their work was outstanding. Both things were true.
Every project we build carries a two year warranty.
Not everyone should hire us, and I would rather say that here than in a first meeting.
If your project is cosmetic, stays inside the permit exempt list, and you actually enjoy the work, do it yourself. You will keep real money and you will like the result more for having done it.
If you know exactly what you want, exactly how it should be built, and you have the time and the temperament to manage the trades yourself, a good independent contractor can be the right fit and you will pay less for it. That is a real path. It asks you to be the general contractor, and some people are good at that.
Hire a design-build firm when the project is large enough that a wrong decision is expensive, when the house has something unusual about it, when the price needs to be settled before construction rather than discovered during it, or when nobody in the household has weeks to give this. That describes most of the people who call us. It does not describe everyone, and knowing which one you are is worth more than any proposal you will read.
Not always. If the cabinets and fixtures go back in their existing locations with no new electrical and no structural changes, Phoenix does not require a permit. You do need one to remove a wall, to move or add a sink, to rewire or add electrical, or to modify a gas line. Most real kitchen remodels cross at least one of those lines.
Use the Arizona Registrar of Contractors contractor search and confirm the license is current on the day you sign, not the day you were quoted. Check that the license class covers the work described in your agreement. Arizona requires a license for any project over $1,000 including labor and materials, or any project that requires a permit.
The proposal is usually higher and the final number is usually much closer to it. You are paying for design work, coordination, and a company that absorbs its own mistakes. Whether that turns out to be more expensive depends entirely on what the other number does after you sign.
An estimate is a projection that can move. A fixed price is a commitment. Ask any remodeler you are considering how many allowances sit inside the number, and what happens when a selection comes in above one. You are entitled to that answer in writing before you commit to anything.
It depends on scope rather than room count. The shortest way to find out is to ask us. If we are not the right fit we will tell you that on the first call and point you somewhere better.
Ask the companies you are considering who pays when the mistake is theirs, and how many allowances are sitting inside the number they gave you. Those two answers will sort them faster than anything else you can do. We are Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team, a family owned design-build firm in Scottsdale serving Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa and Ahwatukee since 2001, with more than 500 remodels behind us. If you want the price settled during design instead of discovered during construction, let's talk through how your project would run. You can also read what Phoenix homeowners say in our Google reviews.
Scott Hochuli is the founder of Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team and the author of Crush Expectations. Pronounced Ha-Cue-Lee, he has been building and remodeling in the Phoenix area since 1992 and founded the company with Lorrie in 2001. He is a past president of the Greater Phoenix chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry and holds Arizona contractor license ROC 173428. Since 2001 the Hochuli team has completed 500+ remodels across Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe and the surrounding valley. Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team · 2501 N. Hayden Rd, Suite #102, Scottsdale, AZ 85257 · (602) 451-0323 · Google reviews.
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