Use AI to Plan and Budget Home Improvement Remodel Projects

How much is my remodel project going to cost? That is a question that every homeowner asks themselves prior to embarking on a home improvement project. Now there are 4 reasons to have a detailed budget for all of your projects. The first is it's an investment into your home, so you want to have a detailed budget for each project that you want to undertake. The second is how are you going to pay for that project? Are you going to pay for it in cash, credit, or a home equity loan? And if it's a loan, you really want to know the right amount of loan that's going to cover the cost of your project. The third one may be the most important, which is even if you're going to hire a contractor, it is the homeowner's responsibility to create a good budget. And the reason why you want to do that before you go out is it's going to help you evaluate the bids of your contractor and ultimately help manage your contractor. And the fourth reason is if you have a detailed budget, you are much more likely not to overspend. Now there are 4 key elements that come together to create a good home remodel budget. The first is having a list of items of all the materials, fixtures, and appliances, etc., that your project requires. The second is understanding the dimensional size of your project because that affects the quantities of materials that are required. The third is what type of products and brands are you going to choose? Are you going to choose high-end luxury, moderate, or low-end products? And the fourth is obviously, are you going to do it DIY or are you going to hire a contractor? Now let's review Homesata, which is an AI-powered digital home management platform, and see how easy it makes it to budget for any single home remodel project. Here's the main dashboard with all the other features like inventory, maintenance, and finances. We're going to click on projects. It takes you to a projects dashboard. You can see I've got 2 wishlist projects already in this property, 2 completed projects, but let's click on the new project. And here is where you see a gallery of over 50 templates that HomeZada has that automatically itemizes typical remodel projects. So we're going to do the bathroom remodel. We're going to hit Create Project. Over on the left-hand side, you can see you can give a quick high estimate— high, medium, or low— in terms of based on what products you want. You're going to choose, I'm going to use a contractor, and let's put in an estimated date of a couple of months from now. Hit Create Project. Now the first amazing thing you see here is the template has automatically identified your list of materials, which is the first thing that you need in order to create a detailed budget. But also notice the budget price is currently at zero. Now in the upper right-hand corner, click on Zada AI Budgets, and this is going to initiate the Zada AI chat. And you can see here that the chat is basically responding saying, hey, you forgot to give me the dimensions and I need that in order to calculate the number of materials. So you could go up to your bathroom and quickly do a measurement and you're like, oh, it's 17— it's 7 by 13.5 feet. And this gets into the dialogue over how Zada AI takes those dimensions, calculates all of the quantities, especially like the tile and the grout and all those other aspects of a bathroom remodel. And it takes your moderate estimate and finds out an aggregate unit rate for those things. And it creates a detailed line item for every single item in your project. Now just think about how amazing this is given how much time it's going to save you if you were to do this one by one using, you know, typical search engine or even going to a home improvement retailer. This system is automatically bringing all this information together. You're getting a detailed line item budget and then it even summarizes that budget for you and you can see here it's at $9,477. But the even greater benefit here is you can see that there's a set of assumptions on all these things. You can have an on-site ongoing dialogue with Zada AI to change certain things. So let's go in and say I want granite slab countertops, a jacuzzi-style bathtub, and 2 sinks. Hit enter, and now HomeZada AI is going to actually rebudget based on your interactive dialogue with the actual tool. This is almost like the equivalent of having a home improvement expert at your fingertips, and you can have this ongoing discussion where you can see it's not just one question, it's multiple questions that you can interact with the Zada AI tool. And this applies to every single kind of project that you might consider. In your property. Kitchen remodels, backyard landscapes, you want to refinish a basement, you want new floors, you want to put on solar. Any of these things can be interactive with the Zada AI tool, which is an amazing way to basically create a detailed set of budgets. And now you can see that based on those assumptions of the jacuzzi-style tub, the added sink, and the granite countertops, I've upped my budget to $11,687. But you can even go further here. Now you can see on the lower right-hand corner, you can save these estimates from the chat window directly back to your project items list that we saw at Xero. And you can even do some last-minute, you know, edits if you want. For instance, you've got this thing called wall hangings, which is an estimate of how much artwork you're going to put in there. You're like, no, I don't really want to budget for that. You just delete the item there, and you're basically making additional edits on the fly. As it relates to that, and you hit Yes. And then now you hit Review Budget Estimates, and notice your entire budget and an individual line item has automatically been entered in here. And at the bottom, you can even see that the Zada AI has estimated the labor, and it's chosen to do it by a contractor. It's actually estimated what the contractor overhead and profit is for that particular project. Now you can obviously use this to track all your purchase price and your brands and before and after photos And all the other downstream things as it relates to your project. But let's go to one other example where I'm going to create a new project. And let's say you can't find a template for HomeZada because you have something new, unique. You hit Create New Empty Project, and you're going to come in here and say, I want a new driveway. Because maybe you've got an old house with a beat-up driveway, and maybe your swag estimate is, I don't know, $7,500. And also you're going to start that on the same time frame. You hit Create Project and notice that the Zada template doesn't pre-populate any of these items. So you would have to basically enter in all these items yourself. Bob, but you've got the Zada AI Budgets. Click on that and now you're going to engage the AI chat. And again, now it's asking you, hey, I need the dimensions. Well, let's try and create a set of dimensions that comes in here and says It is a semicircle that is approximately 12 feet wide. You hit enter, and now notice it's saying, hey, by the way, I actually need the radius of this thing, right? And actually, if I look at the details, it says it needs a radius, but it's actually assumed That the radius would be half of that, or about 6 feet. So let it do its thing. But notice what it's doing here. It's actually identifying all of the items, even though the ZADA template didn't have it. So it's assuming excavation, paving material, compaction, base material, etc. You can see the paving material even says high-quality asphalt or equivalent. But now we're going to engage in it and says, The radius is approximately 25 feet. So I'm increasing the size, and I want concrete driveway. If I could only spell here, concrete driveway. Hit Enter. And again, ongoing dialogue with the Zada AI. Now it's basically saying, oh, you've given me the actual radius of your semicircle. It's even showing you how it's figured out what the radius is. And now it's going to recalculate all of the quantities. And you can see here under the concrete material, it's actually changed it to the high-quality concrete mix. And it's basically created a new budget, which is about $19,000 for this particular project. Same concept, you hit the Save button. And I'm going to save this to my estimate. And now The Xata AI tool is passing to the project items all of those individual items. And here you've got a great budget for your project. Continuing on with HomeXata, then one of the benefits that you get is obviously you can track all these reports. So here's your entire project list. Remember we had a couple in that, that we were working on, that couple are incomplete. Here are my wishlist items. The system also tracks your home tax basis, which is, hey, I paid $521,000 for my house. And I've completed these 2 projects in the past. And here the benefit is of those dates that I was giving. Maybe you have a fixer-upper and you can't afford all the different projects, so you want to do the bathroom remodel and driveway now, but you want to push out the windows and garage upgrades in the future. In summary, Homesata is an amazing digital home management platform that's empowered by AI that makes detailed budgeting for any home remodel project extremely easy and powerful. We encourage all homeowners to go to www.homesada.com and check it out and sign up today.