You'd be surprised how much prices have gone up.
No I wouldn't. Actually, I know the pricing quite well, as I just finished my own reno this year. I did the entire basement including HVAC, removing support walls and installing new support beams, a complete reframing, new insulation, new plumbing, new wiring, pot lights, new Dri-core subfloor and new engineered hardwood, and a complete new custom bathroom (incl. Schluter waterproofing and floor heating), and new kitchen complete with custom cabinets and granite.
And of of course, it pays to shop around and bargain. My basement kitchen granite quote was around $3100, and I got them down to $2700 (incl. tax). Plus there was another place that could have gotten me even cheaper prices for even thicker granite, but the colour and edging selection was more limited.
The tiles I bought were about 1/3rd the cost of usual tile, because I went to the
Olympia Tile Clearance Centre, which only sells off their limited remaining stock. And by limited I mean they might only have 3000 square feet of tile left over, so you just have to estimate well how much tile you need. If you think you need 100 square feet maximum including wastage, then buy 120 square feet, and it still ends up being way, way cheaper than Home Depot.
For similar quality flooring that I got, the pricing ranged from $4.50 per square foot (Etobicoke, after some bargaining) to around $7 (small shops in central Toronto). To get that $4.50 price, the stuff was non-returnable (unless defective). Like the tile, I intentionally bought too much, but I just sold my extra leftover flooring on Kijiji.
For my cabinets, I got one quote for custom bamboo that was $14000, including cabinets and drawers for the kitchen and under-stairs storage closet. I got another quote for < $11000 including that kitchen and under-stairs storage, as well as hallway cabinets and hallway closet, and laundry room. The guy told me if I had gone for wood (eg. maple), the pricing in my setup would have been well under $10000. The door handles I bought myself at Rona. Hinges and cabinet installation were all included in the quote. If I had gone with Ikea cabinets, it might have even been cheaper, plus they had that promotion recently that gave you back 20% in Ikea gift cards if you went with them for kitchen cabinets. However, my GF didn't like their styles, which is why we went for custom modern bamboo.
This is the kitchen with new cabinets and red dragon granite. The gas stove was the old one from my main kitchen, but I had replaced it with a higher end stainless steel one, so I just put this one in the basement. I was going to do the same with my over-the-counter microwave, but ended up just buying a new one on sale from Lowe's. It vents to the outside. BTW, the microwave is NOT stainless steel, but looks like it even up close. Another little bit of money saved there and an added bonus is that it doesn't collect fingerprints as easily as stainless steel.
Here are the flooring and pot lights, and some of the custom hallway cabinetry. The door at the end of the hall is actually an old entrance door that I repurposed into a bedroom door conversation piece.
For the bathroom, these are all clearance tiles except for those few edge tiles on that part that juts out. (That jutting out part contains a heating duct for the bedroom next door.) The selection was limited but we liked these. If we didn't like them, we would have ended up spending 2-3X more for tile at other stores. The fixtures are mid-end, but the ceiling shower head is a store-branded smaller model to save money and to speed up water pressure at the head. (Since water flow in shower heads is limited to conserve water these days, the super wide shower heads have very much lower speeds of water coming out. The smaller the head or fewer the output nozzles, the faster the water speed.) The store model looks exactly the same as high end models, but ones like from Kohler cost 2-3X as much. Furthermore, shower heads can be changed at will by almost anyone, so there is no need to spend a huge hunk of change up front on some high end model you don't even know you'll love. We have both a wall-mounted removable hand-holdable shower head and an overhead rain shower head because we built a seat into the back of the shower (which is 5 feet long). My GF's elderly parents can sit on the seat, and use the hand-holdable shower head while sitting. The shower control allows the user to switch back and forth between the ceiling rain head and the wall-mounted/hand-held one, and unlike low end fixtures it has a constant temp setting even if you change shower water flow output volume. The glass doors weren't in yet in this picture, but the old bathroom already had glass so I just kept them, and made sure the entrance to the shower was the exact same size. The shower door frame is beige stone. Basically, that's all you can get cheap at places like Rona, so that's what I got. To get a custom colour of granite or marble cut from a stone shop just for a shower door frame would have cost several times as much, so I didn't bother.
I will admit one issue that you might encounter with contractors and renos though. For a decent contractor, you might not even get the time of day if the project is less than $15000-20000. They need you to spend that much in order to make things worth their while, or else they'll just tell you to hire a handyman or something.
