There’s a special kind of anxiety that comes with owning a house built in the 1930s. You love the plaster walls, the original heart pine floors, the little quirks that new construction just doesn’t have. But you also know that behind those charming details might be knob-and-tube wiring, horsehair plaster, or a foundation that’s settled a few inches since Roosevelt was in office. When you start Googling 1930s house renovation ideas at 11pm, you’re really asking one question: can I do this myself and save the money, or am I about to turn a weekend project into a six-month nightmare?
That tension is real, and it’s not something to just push past with enthusiasm. Older homes reward careful, informed DIY work — and punish overconfident DIY work — more than almost any other kind of house. This post is here to help you actually run the numbers, not talk you into or out of anything.
We hear versions of this same question constantly from homeowners in Covington and Slidell, where entire streets are lined with 1930s and 1940s bungalows and cottages. Some renovation wish lists are simple — new paint, refinished floors, updated hardware. Others get complicated fast: opening a wall for a kitchen expansion and finding balloon framing instead of standard studs, or discovering the ‘1930s bathroom’ is actually running on galvanized pipe that’s been slowly rusting shut from the inside for eighty years. Good 1930s house renovation ideas start with an honest inventory of what you’re dealing with, not just a mood board.
What DIY Actually Costs on a 1930s Renovation
Let’s start with materials and tools, because this is where most people underestimate. A straightforward-sounding project — say, refinishing original hardwood floors in a 1930s living room — sounds cheap on paper. Rental sander, a few cans of finish, some sandpaper. Maybe $300-400. But 1930s floors often have old nail heads, uneven boards from decades of settling, and finishes that may contain lead if they haven’t been redone since. Add in edge sanders, respirators, and the inevitable extra trip to the rental store when you gouge a board, and you’re often closer to $600-900 for a single room done right.
Bathroom retiling is another classic 1930s project — those small hex-tile floors are iconic, but the subfloor underneath is rarely square or level anymore. If you’re tackling it yourself, a tool like the CHENYUCHAO 2300W Electric Tile Cutting System, 71″ Rail Guide, Wet/Dry makes clean, straight cuts on tricky tile a lot more achievable than a handheld wet saw, especially with the small-format tile that’s popular in original 1930s bathrooms. Between tile, thinset, backer board, grout, and rental or purchased tools, budget $800-1,500 for a small bathroom floor, more if you’re also doing walls or a tub surround.
Painting is often the entry point project for people testing out 1930s house renovation ideas, and it deserves a closer look too. Original plaster walls take paint differently than drywall — they’re more porous in some spots, patched in others from decades of nail holes and cracks, and often covered in multiple layers of older paint that may need a stain-blocking primer before anything new goes on. Budget for quality primer, extra sanding sponges, and patching compound beyond what a big-box paint calculator tells you; a single 12×14 room with cracked plaster can easily eat $150-200 in prep materials alone before you’ve opened a single can of finish paint.
Kitchens are trickier. Full cabinet replacement in a 1930s kitchen often means working around plumbing and electrical that wasn’t installed with modern appliance clearances in mind, and cabinet boxes rarely arrive perfectly sized for a 90-year-old room with out-of-square walls. Refacing existing cabinets instead of replacing them is a genuinely good DIY entry point — new doors, hardware, and a fresh coat of cabinet-grade paint can transform the room for $600-1,200 in materials, a fraction of a full replacement, and it preserves the scale and proportions original to the house.
Electrical and general carpentry work around the house — hanging doors that have shifted with the foundation, replacing outlets, building shelving into oddly-shaped closets — is where a solid cordless tool set earns its keep. A DEWALT 20V MAX Cordless Drill and Impact Driver Combo Kit (DCK240C2) or, if you want more bits and pieces for a house full of projects, the DEWALT 20V MAX 9-Tool Combo Kit (DCK940D2) will cover most of what a 1930s renovation throws at you, from driving screws into old-growth lumber to cutting trim.
If your project includes replacing outlets or switches — common in 1930s houses where two-prong outlets are still the norm — this is a good moment to talk about scope. Swapping a single ungrounded outlet for a properly grounded, GFCI-protected one is very doable for a confident DIYer once the panel itself is confirmed to be correctly grounded. But if you’re finding cloth-insulated wiring, aluminum wiring, or a fuse box instead of a breaker panel, that’s a different project entirely, and one where the cost of a mistake isn’t just money.
Don’t forget the unglamorous stuff. Many 1930s houses in the Covington and Slidell area have crawl spaces that trap humidity, which causes wood rot and mold long before anyone notices a problem. If you’re opening up floors or walls during a renovation, it’s worth running a unit like the ALORAIR Galaxy 60 Crawl Space Dehumidifier 145 PPD, Up to 1,800 Sq. Ft. for a few weeks before and after work to protect your investment. And if you’re pressure washing old brick or clapboard siding before painting, a machine like the SIMPSON Cleaning PS3228 PowerShot 3300 PSI Gas Pressure Washer, Honda GX200 will save you rental fees across multiple projects if you own the house long-term.
One more line item people forget: permits. Depending on scope, your local parish or city may require permits for electrical, plumbing, or structural work, even if you’re doing it yourself. Permit fees are usually modest — often $50-250 depending on the project — but skipping this step on a house this age can create real problems later, especially at resale, when an inspector or appraiser asks for documentation on work that was never permitted.
Add it all up across a multi-room renovation — floors, one bathroom, some electrical, exterior prep — and DIY material and tool costs typically land somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000, depending on scope. That’s real money, but it’s often 40-60% less than hiring out the same work. The catch is what comes next.
What Your Time Is Worth
Here’s the part most DIY cost calculators skip entirely: your hours aren’t free, even if no check gets written for them. If refinishing that one room takes you three weekends instead of the two days a pro crew would need, that’s 20-25 hours of your life. If you make $35 an hour at your day job, that’s $700-875 of opportunity cost, even before you factor in the physical toll of sanding on your knees or the stress of living with dust everywhere.
Consider a real-world stretch: a homeowner decides to refinish original floors in two rooms plus a hallway over what they plan as three weekends. By the second weekend, they’ve discovered old nail heads gouging the sander’s drum, a soft spot near an exterior wall that needs subfloor repair before finishing can even start, and a finish that requires two extra coats because the wood absorbed it unevenly. Three weekends becomes five. That’s not a failure — it’s simply how these houses tend to go — but it’s worth planning for before you start, not after you’re three weekends deep.
Older homes also have a way of turning a simple task into a research project. You pull up flooring and find water damage. You open a wall and find wiring that hasn’t been touched since 1938. You go to hang a door and realize nothing in the house is actually square anymore. Each of these detours costs time you didn’t budget for — often more time than the original project itself.
There’s also a quieter cost that doesn’t show up on any spreadsheet: the toll an extended project takes on a household. Dust sheets over furniture for two months, a bathroom out of commission longer than expected, a kitchen reduced to a hot plate and a cooler — these things add friction to daily life that’s hard to price but easy to feel. If your household includes small kids, pets, or someone working from home, that friction is worth weighing honestly alongside the dollar figures when you’re comparing 1930s house renovation ideas against your actual daily life.
Be honest with yourself about a few things before you commit: How many usable weekend hours do you actually have, once family, work, and rest are accounted for? Have you done this specific task before, or are you learning as you go? And how much do you value having your bathroom, kitchen, or living room back in working order versus stretched across months of half-finished work? None of these questions have a wrong answer, but they should factor into your decision as heavily as the material cost does.
What a Pro Costs, and Why
Hiring out work on a 1930s house typically costs more per square foot than the same work on a newer home, and there’s a legitimate reason for that. Contractors who work on older homes in Louisiana are budgeting for uncertainty: plaster that crumbles differently than drywall, framing that’s true to old lumber dimensions instead of modern 2x4s, wiring and plumbing that may not meet current code and need updating as part of the job, and foundations that have shifted with our region’s clay soil and humidity over 90 years.
As a rough guide, floor refinishing by a professional crew often runs $3-8 per square foot depending on condition, bathroom remodels commonly land between $8,000 and $20,000 depending on finishes and how much of the plumbing and subfloor needs work, and full-room renovations that touch electrical, drywall, and finishes can range from $15,000 to $40,000-plus. These numbers vary a lot by scope, and they’re not meant to guilt anyone into hiring out — they’re meant to give you a realistic anchor point so the decision isn’t made in the dark.
It also helps to understand what’s included in a professional quote versus what often gets left out of a DIY budget. A contractor’s price typically bundles in disposal of old materials (a genuinely unpleasant and heavy job when you’re hauling out an old cast iron tub or a truckload of horsehair plaster), a warranty on the work performed, and the cost of carrying insurance that protects your home if something goes wrong mid-project. None of these show up as separate line items when you’re doing the work yourself, but they don’t disappear either — you’re just the one absorbing the risk instead of transferring it.
Timeline is another place professional pricing pays for itself. A crew of two or three experienced tradespeople can often complete in a week what takes a solo DIYer a month of weekends, simply because of the difference in hours available and the speed that comes from doing this work daily rather than occasionally. If your project involves the only bathroom or kitchen in the house, that compressed timeline alone can be worth the price difference.
What you’re paying for isn’t just labor hours. It’s the experience to recognize a structural issue before it becomes a bigger problem, the licensing and insurance that protect you if something goes wrong, and the speed that comes from having done this exact kind of job dozens of times. For anything involving old wiring, it’s also worth knowing that homes built before 1978 fall under lead-safe work practice rules for any renovation that disturbs painted surfaces — the EPA’s Renovation, Repair, and Painting Program lays out what’s required, and it applies whether you’re doing the work yourself or hiring it out.
How to Decide: A Framework for 1930s House Renovation Ideas
Instead of a gut decision, run your specific project through these questions.
1. Is it cosmetic or structural? Painting, refinishing existing floors, updating hardware, and simple tiling are far more DIY-friendly than anything touching electrical panels, load-bearing walls, plumbing stacks, or foundations. For example, refinishing a hardwood floor or replacing a vanity is cosmetic — get it wrong and you’ve lost some time and material cost. Moving a wall to open a kitchen to a dining room, on the other hand, is structural, and getting it wrong can mean sagging floors or ceilings months later. If you’re not sure which category your project falls into, that uncertainty itself is a signal to at least get a professional opinion before you start.
2. What’s actually behind the wall? If you’ve already opened things up and know what you’re dealing with, DIY risk drops significantly. A homeowner who already replaced their water heater and knows their plumbing is copper, not galvanized, is working from a very different risk profile than someone about to open a wall for the first time since the house was built. If you haven’t opened anything yet and the house has never been renovated, budget extra time and money for surprises — 1930s houses in this region almost always have at least one.
3. Do you have the tools already, or are you buying them? If a project requires a one-time tool purchase you’ll never use again, that changes the math toward hiring out. But if you’re building a collection you’ll use across many projects — a good multi-tool set like the Milwaukee M12 FUEL 2-Tool Combo Kit or the budget-friendly RYOBI P1819 18V ONE+ 6-Tool Combo Kit — that cost gets spread across your whole renovation and future maintenance, making DIY more worthwhile long-term.
4. What’s your timeline pressure? If you have one working bathroom and it’s the one you’re renovating, hiring out to minimize downtime is often worth every dollar. If you have flexibility and no deadline, DIY becomes a lot more appealing since delays cost you inconvenience rather than real hardship. Consider, too, whether the project is reversible. Paint color and hardware are easy to redo if you don’t love the result. A poorly cut tile pattern or a mis-hung door is not, and that irreversibility should push borderline decisions toward hiring out.
5. What happens if the budget runs over? DIY projects on older homes have a well-earned reputation for costing more than the original estimate once hidden issues surface. Before you start, decide honestly whether you have a cushion — in both money and patience — if the project reveals more than expected. If the answer is no, that’s a strong argument for bringing in a professional who can spot likely surprises during an initial walkthrough, before money and materials are already committed.
If you’re weighing a specific piece of the project, our post on how to spot signs of old wiring in a 1930s home walks through what to look for before you commit to a DIY electrical project, and it’s worth a read regardless of which way you lean. We’ve also covered how to restore original woodwork and trim without stripping away the character that makes these houses special, which is one of the most DIY-friendly places to start if you’re new to renovating an older home.
A good rule of thumb: DIY the parts of the project where a mistake costs you time and a little money. Hire out the parts where a mistake costs you a code violation, a structural problem, or a safety hazard. For guidance on which is which, This Old House has decades of project breakdowns specific to older home renovation that are worth browsing before you commit either way.
Getting a Quote, No Pressure
If you’ve run the numbers here and DIY still feels right for your project, go for it — that’s exactly what this blog is for, and we mean it. There’s real satisfaction in bringing a 1930s house back to life with your own hands, and plenty of the ideas above are genuinely achievable for a motivated homeowner with the right tools and a little patience.
But if you’ve gotten partway through this and realized the project is bigger, riskier, or more time-consuming than you expected, that’s a completely normal place to land too — it doesn’t mean you failed at anything. Whichever way you land, the worst outcome is decision paralysis — a half-planned project that sits unfinished because the scope kept growing in your head without ever being tested against real numbers. Use the framework above, get real quotes for comparison even if you think you’ll DIY, and make the call with information instead of guesswork.
If you’d like an honest second opinion on scope and cost before you start, or you’ve decided this one’s better left to people who do it every day, you can get a free quote from our team with no pressure attached. We work on older homes throughout Covington and Slidell regularly, and we’re happy to tell you honestly whether a project is a good DIY candidate or not, even if you end up doing it yourself. Good 1930s house renovation ideas are only as good as the honest cost math behind them, and now you’ve got a framework for running that math on your own project.
