When it comes to building and remodeling, I’ve always thought of myself as a hobbyist builder. Not the weekend “hang a shelf” type, but the kind of person who takes on one major project every year or two. Sometimes it’s new construction from the ground up, sometimes it’s a massive remodel of one of my rental properties, and sometimes it’s a big expansion to my own home.

Because I build infrequently, I have some great relationships with subcontractors and vendors—but not many. I live in this odd middle space. Some people look at me and see a homeowner doing his own projects. Others, who know my history, treat me more like a general contractor. I know my way around plans, bids, and building codes, but I don’t have a logo on my truck or a company name on my sweatshirt.

That in-between status has given me a front-row seat to how the construction industry actually operates. And after my latest remodel, I've come to a pretty firm conclusion: we desperately need robots to build houses.

The Remodel I Dodged for 12 Years

My wife and I bought our home in 2012. From day one, I knew the first floor—roughly 2,000 square feet—needed a massive remodel. The layout was wrong, the finishes were dated, and the whole thing needed to be rethought. Not just new paint and floors. I’m talking walls moved, systems reworked, the full reset button.

And for more than 12 years, I avoided it.

I knew exactly what this kind of remodel would do to our day-to-day life. Dust everywhere. Constant noise. Stuff in boxes. Temporary kitchens and weird workarounds. I knew there’d be endless debates with my wife over design decisions. And honestly, a lot of this space wasn’t even where I personally spent the most time.

So I procrastinated. For over a decade.

Then this year, it hit me: our kids are going to be off to college in what will feel like five minutes. If I didn’t finally pull the trigger on this remodel, we’d never get to enjoy this home as a family in the way I’d always envisioned. It was now or never. Time to do the project.

For Once, I Just Wanted to Write a Check

Normally I act as my own general contractor. I coordinate subs, schedule inspections, order materials, solve problems, and keep the project moving. It’s a lot, but I’m used to it.

This time, though, I wanted something different. After putting off the remodel for 12 years, I wanted to find a design–build firm, write a big check, and let them handle everything. No juggling schedules. No tracking down subs. No spreadsheets. Just: here’s the project, here’s my money, call me when it’s done.

I fully understood this would cost more. I was prepared for that. My thinking was simple: if I could get the project done for, say, $150,000 acting as my own GC, then doubling that to give a firm plenty of margin seemed reasonable. Painful, but reasonable.

So I started calling around. In total, I contacted more than six firms—ranging from large, polished operations to smaller boutique outfits.

The First Question Every Firm Asked

Almost every conversation started with the exact same question:

“What’s your budget?”

My answer was always some version of this:

“Here’s what I think it would cost if I did it myself, acting as the GC. So I assume double that. That should give you plenty of margin to run the project.”

You’d think I had told them I wanted to pay in arcade tokens.

Two firms literally hung up on me. A few more politely declined to bid. A couple gave me full proposals. But the message across the board was consistent: I was nuts.

Every design–build firm I spoke with put the project comfortably over $300,000.

Meanwhile, I was rather confident I could get it done for around $150,000 by acting as my own general contractor and subbing everything out. That number wasn’t fantasy; it was based on years of building my own projects.

So when I kept seeing bids north of $300,000, something wasn’t adding up. A 100% margin didn’t just feel aggressive—it felt absurd.

So I Did What I Always Do: I Took Over

At that point, it was pretty clear no one was going to give me a number that felt remotely tied to reality. So I went back to the model that has worked for me for years: I acted as my own general contractor.

I lined up subcontractors for almost everything. I got multiple bids for each trade. I compared scopes. I asked questions. I negotiated. I treated it like a real project, not a blank check.

Yes, I did a few things myself. Based on the bids I had in hand and what I chose to take on personally, I probably did about $15,000 worth of labor. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not the difference between a $100,000 project and a $300,000 one.

When all was said and done, the total cost came in at just under $100,000.

I also have bids I didn’t accept that would have pushed the project to just under $150,000 had I hired out everything and done no labor myself.

And here’s the key point: my wife and I took no shortcuts. We didn’t go bargain-bin on finishes. We didn’t “value engineer” away the things we actually cared about. We ended up with exactly the finished product we would have wanted if we’d hired a full-service general contractor.

The difference was not in quality. The difference was in how many layers of people stood between me and the person actually doing the work.

Where Does All That Extra Money Go?

This experience left me staring at those original $300,000+ bids and asking: how on earth are these firms justifying that price?

The honest answer: they’re not charging 100% margin and pocketing it. They’re not secretly printing money. I’ve poked around enough to know that most general contractors aren’t living like they’re doubling every job.

Instead, that “margin” is getting chewed up by:

• Layers of subcontractors subcontracting to other subcontractors
• Using overpriced “easy button” subs instead of building real relationships
• Coordinators, project managers, and overhead stacked on top of each other
• Sloppy scheduling, mistakes, and inefficiencies no one is incentivized to fix
• Middleman after middleman, each taking their slice of your construction budget

My conclusion, after interviewing all these firms and running the numbers on my own project: they’re not geniuses; they’re just passing the waste onto clueless homeowners.

General contractors, in many cases, aren’t protecting your budget. They’re not aggressively pruning middlemen. They’re not relentlessly pushing for efficiency. A lot of them are just lazy about the business side. They grab the highest-priced “turnkey” subs, add their markup, and send the bid.

The homeowner ends up paying for a giant game of telephone.

The Era of Cheap Money Broke Residential Construction

I think a lot of this behavior was trained during the era of ultra-low interest rates. For years, homeowners could refinance or take a second mortgage at absurdly low rates. Suddenly a $200,000 remodel didn’t feel like $200,000. It was “just” another monthly payment.

Contractors got used to asking, directly or indirectly: “How much can your house afford?”

Bids ballooned to fill whatever loan amount a homeowner could get approved for. The discipline of pricing based on the actual cost of work and fair margin faded. If the bank said yes, then the bid must be fine, right?

That’s how we ended up with $300,000 bids for projects that can be responsibly built for around $100,000–$150,000.

Waste, Everywhere You Look

I’ve seen the same pattern play out over and over:

• A general contractor hires a framing “company.”
• The framing company subcontracts to a foreman.
• The foreman brings in a buddy as a crew lead.
• The buddy hires workers off Craigslist.

Each step adds cost. Almost none of it adds value.

Repeat that structure for plumbing, electrical, drywall, paint, flooring, tile—you name it—and the job doubles or triples in price without a single material upgrade.

No one optimizes the system because no one has to. The homeowner is at the bottom of the funnel, holding the bill.

Why I’m Rooting for Robots

All of this leads me to the headline of this post: Remodeling my home proved one thing: we need robots to build houses.

For the last 25 years, all I’ve really seen in residential construction is just how much waste there is. Waste in labor. Waste in scheduling. Waste in materials. Waste in management. Waste that gets shrugged off because “that’s just how construction is.”

I don’t buy that. I think that’s just how construction has been allowed to be.

I cannot wait for the day when AI and robotics start to meaningfully replace large parts of this mess. Robots aren’t going to care what your house looks like from the street. They’re not going to adjust bids based on what they think you do for a living. They’re not going to pad numbers because they assume you’ll just roll it into a refinance.

They’ll follow plans. They’ll optimize workflows. They’ll cut out layers of people who exist purely to pass information along and collect a percentage on the way through.

I’m not naïve. I know we’re probably at least a decade away from seeing robots doing serious, mainstream residential construction work, and probably longer before it’s normal. But when that day comes, I will not be sad to see a lot of general contractors and bloated design–build operations lose their grip on the market—especially the ones who spent years running sloppy, inefficient businesses and quietly ripping off homeowners.

Construction should cost what it needs to cost, not what a bloated industry can get away with charging. Until we get robots, the best most of us can do is educate ourselves, act as our own advocates, and, where possible, cut out the middle layers.

But make no mistake: the day robots and AI start tearing into this industry, I’ll be the first in line saying, “What took you so long?”