Where to start home renovation
If you’ve started thinking about renovating or refurbishing your home that’s a great question to be asking yourself. Mainly because that suggests starting to build a plan. I get asked this question a lot. Where should I start? What is the right way of doing this? Should I look for designs I like? Material palettes? Build work schedules? What should be my first step? Well let’s try and answer this question in this blog, shall we?
Let’s address the elephant in the room first. When it comes to design it is never too early to start, but it can be too late. If you’re planning on researching sites like Instagram, Pinterest or other platforms for inspiration - start as soon as you can. What do you like? What matters to you? Equally if you’re planning on getting an architect or interior designer involved - do that as early as possible. The more time you give yourself to provide detailed design and specific requirements the more accurate pricing, timing and advice you can get.
Step 1 - Wish list
My personal opinion is to always start with a schedule of work, brief, or at least a wish list. Something that will help you go through the house and tick off all the spaces listing out what needs doing. I’ve actually prepared a home audit that you can download here👇This should help you address everything in a logical order. Inside, outside, must haves and maybes.
Step 2 - Budget
The next step should be budgeting. Budgeting is one of those things that you need parameters for. If you’ve actually run through an audit and put together a brief scope of works that should give you a good basis for putting figures next to works. Why is that important though? Well. You can’t really design the outcomes without having these financial constraints in place. Well you can, but the chances are - it will not fit in. And what you don’t want to happen is that you’ve designed something cool, something you really really want, it gets you all excited but then it’s miles away from your budget. Trying to simplify it or value engineer it to save on costs is going to do anyone any favours.
Step 3 - Design Mode
Once you’ve worked out what needs doing and how much you can spend I’d say you are ready to go into full design mode. Now you can have fun choosing looks, textures, equipment etc. Remember about permissions and licences you might need to obtain! Also keep in mind that some elements of work are not really going to change regardless of the final looks. Be careful with those. What I mean here is elements such as ground works, structural works, roofing. The costs of these are not really going to change based on your bathroom looks like 😉
Step 5 - Choosing your contractors
Once you’re happy with the final look, you arrive at the point of - who is going to do that work for me? Finding the builder or contractor to do the works is called a tender process. Prior to sending all this stuff to whoever you have found online, it might be worth going over the tender process guide that we have. This will give take you through the process and how to ensure the success of your project and avoid losing money 👇
This will also help you understand ~~~~how build works should be planned. There are reasons we do things in a certain order and there can be negative consequences if this order isn’t kept. Of course there is no right or wrong answer here; you must do what’s right for you.
If you found this blog helpful, did you know that we release a new blog post every couple of weeks? You will find tips, tricks, valuable information as well as case studies of the projects we have completed. If you’d like to stay up to date with our latest publications and what is going on in our world - sign up to the newsletter here 👇👇👇