Full Interior Remodel: Cost, Hours and Process in Hacienda Heights

The sequence is not negotiable and it is the single biggest difference between a shop rebuild and a driveway rebuild. Everything comes out first: furniture, loose cabinetry, trim, valances, shades, and any appliance that sits in a cabinet opening. Only then can the floor be read for moisture and the walls be read for framing location.

Flooring goes in early, before cabinetry, because a floor installed around cabinet bases leaves you with a seam at every toe kick and no way to replace a cabinet later without cutting flooring. Wall and ceiling panels follow, then cabinetry gets set and fastened into located framing rather than into panel, then countertops are templated off the cabinets that are actually installed rather than off a drawing.

Furniture, upholstery and lighting are last, which is also why they are the long lead items that set the calendar. A seating assembly that is 10 weeks out does not delay the demolition, but it absolutely delays the day you get the coach back, so we order those the day the scope is authorized.

• Strip out and cataloguing, including every fastener location worth keeping
• Moisture read on the floor and lower sidewall before anything new goes down
• Framing located and marked behind panels so cabinetry lands in structure
• Flooring first, wall and ceiling panels second, cabinetry third
• Countertops templated off installed cabinets, never off a drawing
• Furniture, upholstery, lighting and trim last, ordered at authorization

Every coach has a gross vehicle weight rating, a dry weight from the builder, and the difference between them minus fuel, water, propane and people is what you actually have left to carry. On many Class A gas coaches and most fifth wheels that remaining figure lands between 1,200 and 3,000 pounds, and a meaningful number of coaches leave the factory with under 1,000 pounds of it once the options are installed. Owners do not know their number, because it is on a sticker in a cabinet nobody reads.

A remodel spends that number fast. Three centimeter quartz runs roughly 15 to 18 pounds per square foot installed, so a galley and bath with 24 square feet of counter is 360 to 430 pounds of stone where the laminate you removed was under 50. Porcelain tile over backer board runs 8 to 10 pounds per square foot, so a tiled shower surround and a tiled galley floor together can add 600 pounds. A residential refrigerator is 250 to 350 pounds against 180 for the absorption unit it replaced. None of those choices is wrong. Three of them together, on a coach with 1,400 pounds of margin, means you are over rating before you load a single suitcase.

So OCRV Center handles it as arithmetic rather than as an argument. We ask for a recent scale ticket, or we work from the builder sticker and the option list, and the material selections get a weight column next to the price column. If you want the stone, we will tell you what has to come off elsewhere to pay for it: lighter flooring, a lighter sofa frame, a composite rather than tile shower pan. Being over rating is not a cosmetic problem. It shows up as tire failure, as brake fade on a grade, and as a coverage argument after an incident.

• Three centimeter quartz or granite, 15 to 18 pounds per square foot installed
• Solid surface acrylic, 6 to 9 pounds per square foot, roughly half of stone
• Porcelain tile over backer, 8 to 10 pounds per square foot
• Luxury vinyl plank, 1.4 to 2 pounds per square foot
• Residential refrigerator, 250 to 350 pounds against 180 for a two way absorption unit
• Solid hardwood cabinet fronts, 90 to 200 pounds over the factory thermofoil doors

On a coach over about eight years old, the strip finds something roughly three times out of four. The most common is a soft spot at the entry step, under the galley sink, or along the slide threshold, because those are the three places water gets in and sits. The second most common is a wall panel bonded so thoroughly to the sidewall that removing it damages the substrate, which turns a panel swap into a panel skin over the existing wall.

The third is framing that is not where it should be. Coaches are built on a line with hand set framing, so the vertical that held the original overhead cabinet may be three inches off the drawing. That is why cabinets get set to located framing rather than to a plan, and it is why a remodel quoted from photographs is a fiction.

We stop and quote what the strip finds rather than absorbing it. A soft floor is a structural repair with its own hours and its own price, and folding it silently into a remodel number is how an owner ends up unable to tell what they paid for.

The band on this page is genuinely wide because the word full covers a 24 foot travel trailer with new flooring, panels, counters and a dinette at the bottom and a 43 foot diesel pusher with a reconfigured floorplan, custom cabinetry and motorized seating at the top. Labor is 20 to 250 plus hours at the posted body and paint rate of $210 per hour, and the materials line is where a remodel differs from collision work: it can exceed the labor.

Because the scope is only knowable after a strip, the estimate tier here is the teardown at one hour of body rate, credited against an authorized repair. That hour buys a walk of the coach with panels and access covers open, a moisture read, a weight conversation and a written scope with the discovery items called out separately.

Calendar runs 3 to 12 weeks and it is almost never labor bound. Seating and furniture lead time, discontinued panel availability and countertop fabrication turnaround set the date. Parts follow the posted policy, including a 100 percent non refundable deposit on special order items, which for interiors is most of what gets ordered.