Editorial Policy how Home Palais researches and prices its guides
How the numbers on this site are produced, and what would have to happen for one to change.
Home Palais publishes cost guides for American homeowners. A cost guide is only worth reading if you can tell where its numbers came from and who paid for them, so this page states both.
Everything below describes what the site actually does today. When the method changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top of every guide moves only when the guide itself has been revised.
Every figure on this site is computed, not typed
Cost figures are never written into an article. They live in one dataset, and one calculation module reads that dataset to produce every number the site prints: the comparison tables, the worked examples in each guide, and the interactive calculators. There is no second set of numbers maintained by hand somewhere else.
That matters for a practical reason. When a material price moves, it moves in one file, and every page that quotes it updates at the next publication. A guide cannot quietly disagree with the calculators, because both are reading the same source.
- Installed costs are national brackets covering both material and labor on a straightforward job.
- Quality tiers are slices of a material’s own sourced range, never multipliers, so no printed figure falls outside what our sources support.
- Totals are rounded to the nearest hundred dollars. An estimate that reads $13,847 claims a precision this data does not have.
- Surcharges such as tear-off, steep pitch and permits are expressed as a share of the base cost, because that is how contractors price them.
An estimate is a way to judge a bid, not to replace one
Every figure here is a national bracket. Your number depends on the size and condition of the specific job, the complexity of the structure, and what crews in your area are charging the week you buy. Two honest contractors can quote the same house differently because they are quoting different scopes.
Use our ranges to work out whether a bid is plausible and which line items to question. Do not use them to negotiate a contractor down to a number this site produced, and never treat them as a quote.
Home Palais is a publication, not a licensed contractor, engineer or attorney. Nothing here is professional advice for your specific property.
We do not collect your details for anyone
Home Palais runs no quote forms. We do not ask for your name, phone number, address or ZIP code in order to pass them to a contractor, and we do not embed third-party lead widgets that do it for us.
This is a deliberate structural choice, not a feature we have yet to build. A publication that sells homeowner contact details has a financial interest in how urgent it can make a repair sound, and we would rather not have that interest.
The tools on this site work without knowing who you are. The calculators return a result with no email gate.
Advertisers do not decide what we recommend
The site is funded by display advertising and by affiliate commissions on products readers choose to buy. Both are disclosed, and neither buys editorial influence.
Advertisers see no coverage in advance and cannot request changes to a published guide. Nobody can pay to appear in a comparison table, to be ranked higher in a buying guide, or to have a competitor removed. Where a guide covers a company we have a commercial relationship with, that relationship is stated on the page.
Sponsored articles, when we publish them, are labelled as sponsored at the top and their outbound links carry the markup that tells search engines they are paid. They are never presented as independent reviews.
Who writes the guides
The site is organized into three desks: exteriors, systems and interiors. Each cluster of guides belongs to one desk, so the same subject is always covered by the same byline and revisions stay consistent.
Author pages describe the beat and the method used on that desk. They claim no professional licenses or certifications, because a cost publication cannot afford a checkable claim it cannot support. If a credentialed contributor takes over a desk, their credentials will be published on the author page and in the structured data alongside it.
How pages are revised
Every guide carries a publication date and an update date. The update date moves only for a substantive revision: new figures, a changed recommendation, a corrected fact. Fixing a typo does not move it, because a date that changes without the content changing is worthless to a reader and discounted by search engines anyway.
When we get something wrong, we correct the page and say so on it rather than editing quietly. If a correction changes the conclusion of a guide, the note stays on the page.
If you have priced a job recently and our range does not match what you were quoted, tell us through the contact page. Bid sheets from real projects are the most useful thing a reader can send us.