Manifesto.

This is a position, not a sales pitch.

Cornice was built on five claims about what a renovation actually is, who it is for, and what software ought and ought not do about it. They are claims we are willing to make publicly, repeatedly, and at cost. They are the spine of what we ship. The product follows from them, not the other way around.

If you find one you disagree with, this probably is not the tool for you — and that is useful information for both of us. If you find one you have been waiting for someone to say plainly, the rest of this site will make sense.

The homeowner is the missing stakeholder.

The construction industry has tools for everyone except the person paying for the work.

Contractors have site-management software. Architects have BIM. Suppliers have procurement systems. Project managers have Procore, Buildertrend, RDash. Every party in a renovation is wired into a system that gives their work shape and accountability — except the homeowner, who is also the principal, also the final approver, and almost always the one absorbing the consequences when something drifts.

What does the homeowner have? A WhatsApp group with the contractor. A spreadsheet that the spouse keeps adding columns to. A folder of receipts. An email thread that no one re-reads. The most expensive purchase most people will ever make is tracked in tools that were not designed for it.

This is not a tooling oversight. It is a market structure. The construction industry sells to itself; software vendors follow the budgets, and the budgets sit with firms, not households. The homeowner is the missing stakeholder because no one has been paid to see them as one.

That is the gap Cornice fills. Not by replacing the contractor’s tools or the PM’s tools, but by giving the homeowner their own — a record of the renovation that is theirs, that travels with them, that they can read at any moment without asking anyone’s permission.

The claim is not that the homeowner should run the renovation. Many homeowners hire a PM precisely so they do not have to. The claim is that they should be able to see what is happening to their money and their home, in real time, without having to chase. That is what a stakeholder gets, in every other industry. It is what a homeowner has been quietly denied in this one.

Drift is a measurable fact, not a character flaw.

Renovations run over budget and over schedule.

The industry talks about this as if it were a personal failing on someone’s part — the contractor was lazy, the PM was disorganised, the homeowner kept changing their mind. Sometimes that is true. Most of the time it is not. Most of the time, the renovation drifted because the feedback loop between a decision and its consequence was too slow to act on.

A change order is signed in week three. The cost effect lands in the final invoice in week eighteen. That is not a character problem. That is a measurement problem.

We use the word drift deliberately. It is a precise term, borrowed from the disciplines where measurement is taken seriously — engineering, finance, navigation. Drift is what happens between the baseline you committed to and where the renovation actually is. It is neutral. It is observable. It can be priced. It can be acted on.

When a homeowner sees drift early, they get to choose. They can absorb it. They can renegotiate it. They can swap a finish, defer a phase, accept the slip. What they cannot do is choose the response if they only learn about the drift in the final invoice.

Cornice is built around making drift visible while the renovation is still in motion. Original budget against revised. Planned timeline against actual. Decisions that have been made and the decisions that are still waiting. The whole picture, updated weekly, in one place.

It will not eliminate drift. No software can. Renovations are physical work in physical spaces, and the world reserves the right to surprise everyone involved. What software can do is shorten the lag between the surprise and the homeowner’s knowledge of it. That is what we ship.

The best project managers don't need defending.

A good project manager is one of the highest-value hires a homeowner can make. The best ones welcome transparency about what they are doing — because their work stands up to it.

There is a version of this product Cornice deliberately is not building: the tool that catches the bad PM. That product would frame transparency as surveillance, and it would attract the wrong PMs and the wrong homeowners. It would also be wrong about how good PMs actually work.

Good PMs already keep records. Good PMs already publish weekly status. Good PMs already explain change orders. They do this because their reputation compounds on it, and because their best clients re-hire them on it. What they do not have, until now, is one place to do all of it that the homeowner can also read.

Cornice is that place. The PM uses it to manage. The homeowner uses it to see. The contractors post into the parts that concern them. Nobody is being audited; everyone is being recorded. That is a different thing.

The PMs who will resist this are the ones whose work does not stand up to a record. They will frame the resistance as concern about homeowner intrusion, or as a question of professional autonomy. Read it as the signal it is.

The PMs who will adopt this — and who, frankly, are the ones we are building for — are the ones already doing the work. For them, Cornice is a faster way to do what they were already doing well, plus a homeowner-side surface that lets the client trust the process without phone calls. That trust is what gets them re-hired. It is what gets them referred. We are firmly on their side.

Documentation is not admin; it's ownership.

Every renovation creates thousands of decisions. The light switch height. The grout colour. The MEP rerouting that nobody told the homeowner about until the wall was already closed. The contractor who said the timber was kiln-dried and then, eight months later, the homeowner is staring at a warped floorboard and trying to remember whether that conversation was on WhatsApp or in person.

Most of these decisions disappear into email threads, hallway conversations, and the gaps between everyone’s memory. They become irrecoverable a year later.

Five years later, when the homeowner is selling the property, refinancing it, repairing it, extending it, or arguing with an insurer about it, they should be able to point at any wall, any fixture, any system, and know why it is the way it is. Who decided. When. Against which alternatives. With what effect on the budget. The renovation is the moment the home was specified. The record of that specification is not an administrative burden — it is part of the home itself.

The construction industry treats this as a service the contractor provides if asked, often poorly, often missing the homeowner’s perspective entirely. The ‘as-built’ file, when it exists, is technical and incomplete. It documents what was built, not why it was decided.

Cornice records the why. Decisions are logged with who decided, when, what was being chosen between, and what the effect was. Photos are tagged to the room and the contractor. Documents are searchable. The record does not require the homeowner to be diligent — it accumulates as the renovation happens.

When the renovation is done, the record stays. Free, forever, read-only. Because it is not our record. It is the home’s.

Software shouldn't try to replace every tool a homeowner uses.

WhatsApp works for contractor chat. The homeowner has a group with the GC, the foreman, the tile guy. It is fast. It is voice-note-friendly. It survives bad signal on site. The homeowner is not going to abandon it because a software vendor wants them to.

Spreadsheets are fine, until they break. The homeowner’s spreadsheet has been working for three months. It will keep working until the budget grows to the point where someone needs to reconcile change orders against the original line items at speed, and at that point the spreadsheet stops being a tool and starts being a problem. The threshold is real, but it is not at week one.

Cameras are great at being cameras. The homeowner takes a photo of a tile selection at the showroom on a Saturday. They are not going to open an app first. They are going to use the camera that is already open. The job of the software is to receive that photo and put it where it can be found again — not to replace the camera.

A lot of renovation software, including some that is well- funded, does not understand this. It tries to be the place where the homeowner does everything. It builds a chat. It builds a spreadsheet. It builds a camera roll. The homeowner installs it for two weeks, then quietly goes back to WhatsApp, and the software disappears with their data.

Cornice is built the other way around. It assumes the homeowner is already using the tools they are already using. The job is to connect them — receive the photo, log the expense, summarise the WhatsApp conversation when asked, send the weekly status — not to replace them.

The good news, for the homeowner, is that this is also the version that lasts.