Renovation Cost by Room Spreadsheet

Who this is for

See which room is eating the budget. Each room gets one row with a planned and an actual figure for labour, materials, fixtures and everything else, and the sheet works out the variance room by room and against your overall budget.

Homeowners renovating more than one room at once, and anyone whose single-line renovation budget shows an overspend without saying where it came from.

What this helps you track

• A planned figure for every room, split into labour, materials, fixtures and other
• What each room has actually cost so far under the same four headings
• The rooms running over and the rooms coming in under
• How much of your overall budget has been used

How to use it

1. Write the property, the project name, the start date and the overall budget you have set yourself.
2. Give each room a row and enter the planned figure for labour, materials, fixtures and other costs from your quotes and your own estimates.
3. Fill the actual columns as invoices and receipts come in, putting each cost against the room it belongs to.
4. The variance and the totals are worked out in the browser and the workbook; on paper, add the four planned figures, add the four actual ones and subtract.
5. Check the summary for the share of the overall budget used, and look along the row of any room with a negative variance to see which heading caused it.

Formats

• Printable PDF (A4 and US Letter)
• Fillable PDF with form fields
• Fill in online, saved in your browser
• Excel / Google Sheets workbook

The printable is laid out inside a box that fits both A4 and US Letter, so the two files are identical and neither one is scaled. The fillable PDF has real form fields. The workbook uses plain formulas only — SUM, IF, COUNTIF and the like — so it opens in Excel, LibreOffice and Google Sheets without anything breaking, and every calculated cell is grey so you can see which figures it worked out.

How to print

Download the A4 or US Letter file to match the paper in your printer, open it in a PDF reader and print at 100% — not "fit to page", which shrinks the writing space. Both files leave a 14 mm margin, which clears the unprintable edge on home printers. To print the online version with your entries in it, use the Print this sheet button, which prints only the sheet and none of the page around it. More on printing.

Questions

What counts as fixtures rather than materials?

Whatever you decide, as long as you stay consistent. A common split is materials for things consumed in the work, such as plaster, timber and adhesive, and fixtures for things you chose and can point at, such as taps, lights and sanitaryware.

Where do shared costs like skip hire or scaffolding go?

Give them a row of their own, named something like whole house, rather than dividing them between rooms. That keeps the room figures comparable and still counts the cost in the project total.

What does the variance show?

Planned minus actual for the room across all four headings. A positive figure means the room is under its plan and a negative figure means it has gone over.

How is this different from a single renovation budget?

A single budget lists costs line by line. This sheet arranges them by room, so when the project runs over you can see at a glance whether it was the kitchen, the bathroom or the fees that did it.