DH and I are ready to officially plan/schedule some home renovations we've wanted to do for a while. We'll be moving laundry upstairs, turning the old laundry room into a mudroom and also adding a shower to the half bath that's just on the other side of the current laundry room. We plan to hire a pro for the plumbing, electrical, drywall and bath stuff. We would do all the mudroom and laundry room cabinetry ourselves. My (optimistic?) hope is that the contract work would take 2-3 weeks and then the rest would be ongoing work for a decent amount of time.

The big question is - when should we get started? Mainly because I'm due with baby #2 in 10 weeks. So I see a few options:

1) Get going now! Try and get all the contract work done before baby is born. It'll make for a hectic sprint, but then we could have our maternity/paternity leave time to work on some of the other stuff here and there. Plus, having laundry upstairs with a newborn - awesome!

2) Start this summer. I'd be on maternity leave and could be home to oversee things. But the thought of people traipsing through my house and banging etc with a newborn sounds pretty awful. Mostly leaning away from this one.

3) Start this fall/winter. Wait till baby is 6 months or so and hopefully is out of newborn craziness. This might be good for DS too to keep changes to a minimum. I can see it being harder trying to get the remaining work done with a baby that's approaching mobility though, so I think this might significantly stretch the timeline

4) Wait even longer. I'm not sure if there's ever an "easy" time in parenting 2 littles, so I'm curious when people think this might be. Biggest downside is waiting to have a functional entryway and laundry upstairs.

Any home reno veterans (or anyone else) have any thoughts?