Most whole-home projects around here don't start with someone wanting a different house. They start with a main floor that fights you every day, a bedroom on the wrong level of the house, or a formal living room nobody has actually sat in since 2015.
Then you go looking for ideas, and every trend list tells you about color drenching and honey oak floors. Useful, maybe. None of it tells you what anything costs, whether it holds up in a Michigan house that was framed in 1962, or which room to start with when the whole place needs attention at once and you can only afford to do some of it.
We build these projects in Greater Lansing. Before we wrote a word of this, we went back through our own completed projects and read every message homeowners sent us this year. This isn't a prediction from a mood board. It's what we're actually seeing, and what it actually costs.
In this blog you'll learn the seven whole-home remodeling trends worth your money in 2027, what each one costs in a Greater Lansing home, what's on the way out, where to start when the whole house needs work, and how to find the three trends that fit your house.
Find Your Top 3 Whole-Home Trends (Take the 2-Minute Quiz)
Jerry Dowell is a Licensed Residential Builder, Designer, and Estimator at Odd Fellows Contracting in Greater Lansing, MI, with more than 30 years in design-build. He spent over two decades on kitchen and bath design before moving into full-house and structural work, and he's the person who figures out whether the wall you want gone is holding up your second floor.
The big shift for 2027 is that people have stopped remodeling to sell and started remodeling to stay.
Houzz research says close to two-thirds of homeowners expect to be in their house eleven years or more. That changes what a remodel is for. You're not staging a kitchen for a buyer you'll never meet. You're deciding how you want to live in this house for the next decade, and probably longer than that.
The market backs it up. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies expects remodeling spending growth to slow sharply in early 2027, down to roughly half a percent year over year, while the National Association of Home Builders still projects about 2% growth in real terms. That means steady, not frantic. Nobody needs to rush, and anyone telling you to rush is selling something.
What we're seeing locally lines up with the national read on the big structural stuff and diverges on the decorative stuff. The industry is predicting warm clay walls and color drenching. Around here, people write to us about a bedroom they can't get to without stairs and a laundry room in the basement. We'll cover both, but we're going to be straight about which one we see people actually asking for.
For every trend, you'll see what the industry is predicting, what we're actually seeing in Greater Lansing homes, and what it costs.
The single most common whole-home request we get is moving primary living onto one level.
It almost never arrives with the words "aging in place." It arrives like this: "We have a two story colonial and there are no bedrooms on the main floor. We are retired and have decided we are going to stay in our current house." Or simply, "we want to remodel and update to be able to live in our home as we age."
The industry calls this aging in place or universal design. Our clients call it staying put. Our own project write-ups tend to say "forever home," which is closer to how it actually feels.
What it looks like in practice is rarely a hospital-grade retrofit. It's a wider doorway you don't notice. A shower with a bench and no lip to step over. Blocking behind the drywall now so a grab bar can go in later without tearing out tile. Laundry that isn't down a flight of stairs. Done during a remodel you were doing anyway, most of it costs very little extra. Done later, as an emergency, it costs a great deal more.
In a Greater Lansing home a lot of our housing stock is two-story colonials and ranches from the 1950s through the 1990s, and the ranches convert far more easily. In a two-story, this usually means converting a den, a formal living room, or a bonus room rather than building anything new.
Cost depends on what the room already has. Converting an existing room and expanding a half bath into a full bath lands in the bathroom remodel range of $18,000 to $35,000 for a refresh and $35,000 to $60,000 for a mid-range remodel, plus the bedroom work. We break this down further in our cost guide.
Project spotlight: Holt Half Bath Expansion
The homeowner wanted to stay in her home longer, and the house had no full bathroom and no bedroom on the main floor. We converted the existing living room into an office and bedroom space, then used some of that square footage to expand the half bath into a full bathroom with a shower, vanity, and toilet. The shower was built with a bench to help with future accessibility needs, before anyone needed it. No addition and no new foundation, and she ended up with a main-floor bedroom and full bath that weren't there before.
For cost, this usually lands in the Refresh to Mid Range tier.
The cheapest square footage in your house is the square footage you're already paying for and not using.
This is the trend we'd most like homeowners to take seriously, because it's the one that saves real money. Look at what we've actually built: a detached garage in Okemos turned into living space with a kitchenette and full bathroom. A bonus room in Okemos turned into a full primary suite. A closet by the garage entry turned into a stackable laundry. A living room in Holt turned into an office and bedroom so the homeowner could expand the half bath next to it.
None of those required a foundation, a roofline, or a permit for new footprint. All of them gave the family a room they didn't have before. In a Greater Lansing home older houses around here are full of rooms designed for how people lived in 1965. Formal living rooms, separate dining rooms, oversized garages.
The math is why this trend matters. Our cost guide puts a primary suite addition at $150,000 to $300,000+ and a bathroom addition at $70,000 to $130,000+, because you're paying for a foundation, a roof, and exterior walls before you get to the room itself. Converting space you already have skips most of that. The finished work is priced like any other whole-home project, starting at $120+ per square foot for economy and $160+ for mid range, and if the conversion adds a bathroom, that piece usually runs $18,000 to $60,000 depending on the finish level.
Project spotlight: Okemos Detached Garage Conversion
The existing garage was starting to fall down and needed attention either way. Rather than replace a garage, the homeowner asked whether it could become a space for a home office or for guests to stay. We converted it into living space with a kitchenette and a full bathroom, which meant adding plumbing, more electrical, a new roof, and leveling the floor. That's an in-law suite in everything but name, built without touching the main house.
For cost, this usually lands in the Mid Range tier, since it involves new plumbing, electrical, and mechanical work.
Open concept isn't dead. It's getting more specific.
The industry term for 2027 is "broken-plan living," and the driver is that people work and study at home now and need a door they can close. The national coverage frames this as a retreat from the wide-open great room toward defined zones.
From the messages we get, almost nobody in Greater Lansing is asking for a warehouse, and almost nobody is asking to put the walls back either. They ask to remove one specific wall. Usually it's the one between the kitchen and the family room, because that's where everyone already is.
So the trend isn't open versus closed. It's opening the wall that's actually in your way and leaving the rest alone.
On a recent kitchen, the homeowner told us one wall was load-bearing, one wasn't, and both had HVAC and electrical in them. A load-bearing wall means a beam, and a beam means figuring out where the load goes. In our Tacoma Hills project, the joist layout between the main floor and the upstairs meant adding support beams and rerouting mechanicals before anything looked like a kitchen.
In a Greater Lansing home, 1950s and 60s ranches often have a bearing wall straight down the middle. It can almost always come out. It just needs a beam, and the beam needs a path to the foundation.
Cost for a wall removal is priced within the larger remodel rather than on its own, because the beam, the mechanical rerouting, and the ceiling and floor repairs are what carry the cost, not the demolition.
Project spotlight: Cornell Okemos Home Remodel
Our own write-up on this one opens with four words: "This was a big project." Taking out the wall between the kitchen and the family room is what made the rest possible, because it gave the designer real options on how to lay the kitchen out and room to expand it. The same project also brought the laundry up from the basement into a converted closet, turned a bonus room into a full primary suite, and reconfigured a half bathroom into a full bath to serve it. One wall, and the whole main floor changed.
For cost, this usually lands in the Mid Range to Luxury tier.
The spare bedroom that's also an office that's also where your in-laws sleep at Thanksgiving is now a design problem people plan for instead of apologize for.
The national forecast has this as office-by-day, guest-room-by-night, with fold-away partitions and clever dividers. We see a simpler version: one room, two jobs, and enough built-in storage that switching between them takes five minutes instead of an afternoon. The Holt living room that became an office and bedroom is exactly this, and so is the Okemos garage that now works as either a home office or a guest space depending on the week.
Built-in carpentry is having a real comeback alongside this, and it's one place where we agree with the trend forecasters completely. Paneling, trim detail, and built-in shelving got stripped out of houses for twenty years in favor of blank drywall. It's coming back, and it's useful here because built-ins are how a dual-purpose room stops looking like a room that can't make up its mind.
In a Greater Lansing home the best candidate is usually the formal living room at the front of the house. Good light, decent size, and in most families it's the least-used room in the building.
Cost varies widely with how much cabinetry is involved. Built-in carpentry is priced by the linear foot and the finish level, so it's worth pricing as its own line in your plan.
Project spotlight: Williamston Family Room Addition
A room designed around more than one job from the start. It's a gathering space with a vaulted ceiling, a wood burning fireplace, and an oversized ceiling fan, and it also solved the practical problem of getting firewood in from the garage through a built-in barn door. Ample windows and a sliding glass door keep it usable as an everyday room rather than a room reserved for company.
For cost, this usually lands in the Mid Range to Luxury tier.
If we had to name one trend our own project record confirms most consistently, it's this one.
Read our project goals back to back and the same sentence keeps appearing. Cornell Okemos: "Bring the laundry from the basement to the main floor by creating a mud-room space from the garage." Garage Laundry Addition: "Bring the laundry from the basement to the main floor for easier access." Tacoma Hills: "Change the layout of the garage entry into a mudroom." In East Lansing we built a drop zone by the refrigerator so the family had somewhere to leave keys, charge phones, and sort the mail.
Four separate projects, nearly the same words. Nobody puts this on a trends list because it isn't photogenic. However, it's just the thing that makes a house stop feeling chaotic on a Tuesday morning.
The national coverage gets close with "concealed utilitarian areas," hidden pantries and deep organizer drawers, keeping clutter out of sight. Same instinct. We'd just point it at the door everyone actually uses.
In a Greater Lansing home you come in through the garage, in boots, from November through March. A mudroom here is the difference between a clean floor and a salt-stained one. A basement laundry also gets a lot less charming as you get older, which ties this straight back to trend one.
Cost for a mudroom or drop zone built into an existing garage entry or hallway is usually one of the lower-cost, highest-satisfaction pieces of a whole-home project. Relocating laundry costs more, because plumbing, venting, and electrical all have to move with it.
Project spotlight: Tacoma Hills Home Remodel
This is the project that shows how far the mudroom idea reaches. Our portfolio lists it as a kitchen remodel, and our own write-up admits the scope "extended to the majority of the main floor of the home." Part of that was the garage entry, which we rebuilt as a proper mudroom with storage cabinets and a place to hang coats. The same project also converted the laundry space into a combined bathroom and laundry room serving an adjacent bedroom. The kitchen got the photos. The mudroom is the part the family uses every single morning.
For cost, this usually lands in the Mid Range to Luxury tier.
Flooring is the thing that makes a phased remodel read as one house instead of four projects.
It comes up constantly in what homeowners write to us. "We are looking to put in new flooring across most of the main level." "Also want to redo the flooring the entire first floor. Our initial thought is the same flooring throughout but open to ideas." "Flooring will be one of the main parts of the project."
It shows up in our finished work just as often. At Cornell Woods we matched new flooring to the existing Chelsea Plank and refinished the whole run so the seam disappeared. In Okemos we carried the kitchen flooring through to several other main-floor rooms to tie it together. At Tacoma Hills the flooring ran across most of the main floor in a mix of tile, carpet, and luxury vinyl plank.
If you're remodeling over three years instead of three months, flooring is the single strongest tool you have for making the finished result look deliberate. It's also the reason flooring usually goes last.
In a Greater Lansing home we install a lot of luxury vinyl plank, and it earns its reputation in this climate. It handles wet boots, dogs, and the humidity swing between a Michigan January and a Michigan July better than most alternatives. If you're weighing options, we compared them in detail in our guide to LVP vs. tile vs. hardwood flooring.
This is usually priced by square foot and material, and it scales with how much of the main level you do at once. Doing it all in one pass is almost always cheaper per foot than doing it room by room.
Project spotlight: Okemos Kitchen Expansion
The homeowner wanted a bigger kitchen that fit the rest of the house, and they wanted easier access to a three seasons room that could previously only be reached through the laundry room or the deck. Enlarging the kitchen meant reworking the deck as part of the job. The detail worth borrowing is the flooring: it was updated in the kitchen and then carried through to multiple parts of the main floor, which is what keeps an expansion from looking like a piece bolted onto an older house.
For cost, this usually lands in the Mid Range to Luxury tier.
Here's where we part ways with most of the 2027 trend coverage.
Nearly every forecast puts electrification and smart home tech near the top. Heat pump conversions, solar, EV charger pre-wiring, whole-home energy monitoring, automated lighting and shades, hidden tech everywhere.
We went through every message homeowners sent us this year. Across all of them, we found almost no requests for any of it. Not one person asked about a heat pump. Nobody asked about energy monitoring or EV charging.
We're not saying the trend is wrong. National data is national data, incentives are real, and if you want any of it we'll build it properly. We're saying that in Greater Lansing, right now it is not what people are asking us for.
What does matter at whole-home scope, and what we'd actually raise with you:
Lighting, done as a plan. This one we agree with the forecasters on completely. A grid of recessed cans across the whole ceiling is on its way out, and good riddance. Layered lighting, some ambient, some task, some accent, it helps makes a remodeled room feel finished.
Whether your mechanicals reach. When you open up a main floor or convert a garage, the existing HVAC often can't serve the new layout. Better to size that at design than discover it in February.
Your electrical panel. Older Lansing houses frequently need panel work before they can carry a modern kitchen, let alone a charger. It's unglamorous and it's usually not optional.
A note as you read. These are the trends we're seeing across the industry heading into 2027, filtered through what we actually build in Greater Lansing homes. When you come in, our designers will have their own take on where things are headed and what fits your specific house. Trends are a starting point, not a rulebook.
You can see our recently finished work, including every project above, in our whole home portfolio.
A few things are aging faster than the people who installed them expected, and it's worth knowing before you spend money matching them.
The wide-open gray great room: Not the openness, the gray. The cool gray-and-greige palette that ran from about 2014 to 2022 is the clearest date stamp in residential design right now.
Cold gray flooring: Worth being precise here, because we install a lot of luxury vinyl plank and we stand behind the material. It's the color that's dating, not the product. Gray-toned LVP reads as mid-2010s. Warmer oak and maple tones in the same material don't.
Recessed can grids: Twelve identical lights in a ceiling, all doing the same job, all on one switch.
Remodeling for resale when you aren't selling: If you're going to be in the house eleven more years, build it for the eleven years, not for a buyer who may never show up.
Formal rooms nobody sits in: The dining room used twice a year and the living room with the good furniture that's off-limits.
Spending the whole budget on one showpiece room: A spectacular kitchen attached to a house where the laundry is still in the basement and the only full bath is upstairs.
If you have some of these, nothing in your house is broken. Everything on this list was a good idea once. It's just worth knowing which way things are moving.
Seven trends is a lot to weigh against one house and one budget.
Answer six quick questions about what's pushing the project, which part of the house is the problem, who needs to live there comfortably, and roughly what you're ready to spend. You'll get the three trends that actually fit your house, what each one tends to cost, and a sensible next step. It takes about two minutes and there's nothing to sign up for.
Start with a finding from the 2026 Houzz & Home Study, since it's the most useful and least comfortable statistic in this whole article. Three quarters of homeowners set a budget. Nearly two in five, 37%, went over it. More of them went over than came in on target.
The reasons are worth reading closely. Just over half who blew the budget pointed to unexpected product or service costs. The rest was choice: 35% upgraded to higher-end materials than planned, and 31% expanded the scope partway through.
That first group is a planning failure, and it's preventable. When you price a project off an idea instead of a finished drawing, every decision you haven't made yet turns into a change order later. The second group points at something else entirely: a budget that was never built to hold the project people actually wanted.
Here's what whole-home work actually runs with us in Greater Lansing.
Whole home remodel, by level of finish:
Individual rooms, for phasing:
What moves a project between those tiers is mostly cabinetry, countertop material, tile selection, and how much has to move. Plumbing and load-bearing changes cost more than finishes. A kitchen that keeps its footprint and gets new everything can land below a kitchen that moves a sink eight feet.
Reworking space you already have generally costs less than building new, because the foundation, roof, and exterior walls are already there and already paid for. For comparison, a primary suite addition runs $150,000 to $300,000+ and a bathroom addition $70,000 to $130,000+.
Full detail by service is in our cost guide.
Our own answer to the overrun problem is structural. We put the first four steps of our six-step process into planning, and you get fixed pricing before construction starts. Clear process, fixed pricing, no surprises. That's the thing that keeps a $50,000 project from becoming a $70,000 one.
The most common question we get on whole-home projects isn't about trends at all. It's "where do we even start?"
Here's the sequence that works, and the reasoning behind it.
Plan the whole house first, even if you build it over three years: This is the one that matters most. You don't need to fund everything now. You do need to know where it's all going, because decisions you make in year one either enable or block what you want in year three.
Structure and mechanicals before anything you can see: Framing, beams, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, insulation. All of it is cheap while the walls are open and expensive after they're closed.
Never open the same wall twice: If the kitchen and the bathroom share a wet wall, do them together or at least plan them together. Doing them two years apart means paying for the same demolition and the same drywall repair twice.
Flooring late, and in one pass: Continuous flooring is what makes phased work read as one house, and it's much cheaper to run it all at once.
Something to watch for while you're planning: projects grow. Our Tacoma Hills job is listed in our portfolio as a kitchen remodel, and our own write-up says the scope "extended to the majority of the main floor of the home." The kitchen was gutted and relaid out, support beams went in, flooring ran across most of the main floor, the laundry became a bathroom with laundry in it, a cramped bedroom got enlarged, and the garage entry became a mudroom.
Nothing went wrong there. That's a kitchen remodel running into the truth that rooms connect to other rooms. Planning the whole house up front is how you meet that on purpose instead of by surprise.
Framing that doesn't want to cooperate: At Tacoma Hills the joist layout between the main floor and the second story meant new support beams and mechanical changes before the kitchen could take its new shape.
Things that stopped working and got closed up: In Haslett, a fireplace had gone drafty and unusable years earlier. We took it out and used the space for a bathroom and an enlarged closet. The problem became the square footage.
Structure that's failing: Rotted decking, posts past their service life, railings that aren't to code. In Haslett a deck railing was a genuine hazard with grandchildren around.
Work somebody else started: In Okemos a homeowner hired another contractor for an addition. The structure wasn't to code and had to come down before we could build it properly. Our own write-up on that one says Odd Fellows Contracting "was able to once again come to the rescue," which tells you how often we see it.
This is the argument for front-loading design. Four planning steps before construction is where we find most of this, on paper, while it's still cheap to solve. Finding it after demolition is how budgets get exceeded.
Run any trend on this list through these before you commit to it.
Whole-home work is where design-build earns its keep, because the hard part isn't any single room. It's the connections between them.
We've been remodeling Greater Lansing homes since 1988. Design and construction sit under one roof here, so the person drawing your main floor and the person building it work for the same company and talk to each other before problems reach you. We have in-house designers, a showroom where you can see and handle materials instead of guessing from samples, and full 3D rendering, which in our market genuinely does set us apart. You see the space before we build it.
Our six-step design-build process puts the first four steps into planning. On a whole-home project those planning steps carry the entire job. It's where we catch the joist layout, the load-bearing wall, the panel that needs upgrading, and the question of whether your HVAC can actually reach the room you want to convert. It's also how we can give you fixed pricing before construction starts, which is the direct answer to the overrun problem.
Clear process. Fixed pricing. No surprises. Plan thoroughly, build confidently.
The seven we expect to define 2027 in Greater Lansing are: moving a bedroom and full bath to the main floor, converting existing space instead of building new, opening one strategic wall rather than all of them, rooms that serve two purposes, mudrooms and main-floor laundry, continuous flooring across the main level, and a practical approach to lighting and mechanical systems over smart home tech.
Whole-home remodels run $120+ per square foot at an economy finish level, $160+ mid range, and $225+ for luxury. Individual rooms vary: a kitchen runs $18,000 to $145,000+ depending on tier, and a bathroom $18,000 to $85,000+. Our cost guide breaks it down by service.
Start by planning the entire house, even if you'll build it in phases over several years. Then sequence structure and mechanical work before finishes, group anything sharing a wall or a trade, run flooring across the main level in one pass, and paint last. The planning step is what prevents paying twice for the same demolition.
It depends heavily on scope and whether you're phasing. The bigger variable is planning: projects with complete drawings and selections finalized before construction move faster and change less. We walk through realistic timelines during design.
Often yes, especially if the work is phased by area so you keep a functioning kitchen or bathroom. Full main-floor projects are harder to live through. It's worth deciding early, because it changes both the sequence and the cost.
Usually, if the structure is sound and you like where you live. Older Lansing houses tend to have good bones, bigger lots, and established neighborhoods. They also hide things, which is why the planning steps matter. The better question is whether the layout can become what you need.
Yes, and it's frequently the most cost-effective move available. We've converted a detached garage into living space with a kitchenette and full bathroom, and turned a bonus room into a full primary suite. Conversions avoid the cost of a new foundation, roof, and exterior walls.
Continuous flooring across the main level does most of the work, along with consistent trim, paint, and hardware decided at the start rather than chosen room by room. Pick the palette and materials once, during planning, then execute against it over however many years the budget takes.
The trends worth your money in 2027 have almost nothing to do with color and everything to do with how the house works on an ordinary Wednesday. A bedroom you can reach. A wall in the right place. A room that does two jobs. Laundry on the floor you live on.
We've been doing this in Greater Lansing since 1988, and we've spent the last few years building exactly these projects for people who decided to stay in the house they already love. Design and build under one roof, planning before pricing, and a fixed number before construction starts.
Every successful remodel starts with a clear plan. Let's walk through your ideas, your timeline, and what it will realistically take to get there.
Or take the 2-minute quiz to see which three trends fit your house, browse our whole-home portfolio, or download the cost guide. You can also see how we plan and price whole-home remodeling from the first walkthrough.
Starting with one room? We ran the same breakdown, quiz included, for 2027 kitchen trends and 2027 bathroom trends.