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Renovating your home is an enormous job that you have to be prepared for. If you plan on living in the house as you refurbish, then you are, in fact, courageous, and you’ll need to be even more focused on planning. In reality, it could turn out to be a nightmarish if you’re not careful.
Breathing fresh life into an old home or simply repairing a deserted home on a budget can be extremely pleasing. And, where house prices are a bit out of reach, it could be your most excellent method to get on the property stepladder or pay money for more house than you may have been capable to pay for.
Before you get impatient and jump in head first, make sure that you have planned for the renovation in advance. Planning will make the process run smoothly and help facilitate your plan for the financing of your renovation more precisely.
You have to worry about more than just the labor. There’s the logistics of acquiring and transporting the material for the renovation, and ensuring you have a place to store the materials at the work site. This may mean renting or paying for the right trucking or hauling service. If you have never done any overhaul previously or do not have any contacts, you want to get as much as the information under your belt as possible.
You’ll also want to enlist the help of contractors for jobs you won’t be able to do on your own. Plumbing and electrical work are typical things you may have to pay someone to do. Don’t leave yourself in a bad position because you tried to do something yourself that should have been left to a professional.
Buying a house is a significant undertaking; you go through all the negotiations with the seller, save up money for a down payment, and you manage to get a loan from the bank. Good for you. Now comes the hard part: creating it your own.
Whether you’re in for a full renovation or only trying to spruce up, there is a lot more to designing a home than you might realize. Get in touch with renovation suppliers plus the dump truck bodies maker for the transport of the material.
So how do you ensure that you don’t get stuck in a money pit? Always get a home inspection conducted by a licensed inspector – this is normally required by the bank when you buy a house, but depending on where you live it might be optional. If it is optional, get it anyway because the information provided by the inspector will be very valuable as you plan out your renovation. A good inspector will give you advice on what repairs are needed so you can have fewer surprise expenses.
Location is (nearly) the Whole Thing
The old proverb goes that you should look for the worst house on the best street and it’s huge advice for any person searching for a home that will provide a large return on investment. No matter how amazing you make the property, it can only be as good as the area it’s in, so verify the neighboring amenities, schools and reputation of the neighborhood.
Skimping on Quality
Pay out good money on the things you touch each day. This includes things like the door hardware, doors, faucets, fixtures, and kitchen cabinets. Using high quality versions of these items will give your home a fine detailed look. For example, almost no one can tell the difference between good quality cabinets and average quality cabinets, but they definitely know the different between cheap plastic cabinet handles and nice solid metal ones.
Keep an Eye Out for Everything that Will Cost a Lot to Patch Up
Repairing a roof could put you back thousands of dollars, so make sure you look for common signs of an old roof. Does the roof sag? Are there missing shingles? Missing shingles could be allowing water to leak into the house so if you do see missing shingles look inside carefully for water damage.
Windows will add significantly to your renewal budget, too. They do however, tend to add quite a bit of value to the house, so you can recover some of the expense if you plan to sell in the future. Energy efficient windows can pay for themselves over time.
Investing Too Much on Technology
Technology can be costly and become outdated really fast. At the same time as wiring all the rooms in your home for video might look like cool, it’s not necessarily a great asset. Generally high tech upgrades don’t have a good return on investment.
Planning & Workflow
Apart from the above, also decide which room you will start with and go from there. Some people believe that it is best to start with the construction work and do the full house at once, but others believe that completing one room at a time will provide you the majority of the rewards and keep you going.
Whether you do the entire house at once or one room at a time is going to depend on whether you live in the house during the renovation or which rooms we’re talking about.
The Kitchen will most likely be your most expensive room to do, so it usually either the first (or last) area of the home that’s renovated. Attempting to do the kitchen in the middle of all the other rooms can be an easy way to lose track of your budget.
Bathrooms also tend to be quite expensive, but like kitchens they add a lot of value to the home. Doing them first will allow you to invest in the areas with the most payoff.
Financing & Final Thoughts
Some banks offer construction or renovation loans. These loans will be given based on an assumed value increase on the property and the money from these loans must be used for home improvement.
With a limited budget, you have to be practical about what work you can do and when. If the property is not in a livable state, your first main concern should be to make it so. You’ll have to make sure the plumbing and HVAC systems are in safe working condition. If you have to burn money living somewhere else while the house is being made livable, then getting it to a state where you can move in becomes a priority – every dollar you spend living somewhere else is one less dollar you have towards improving your home.
Mario Rolls is a blog consultant and writer at Dump Trucks. He brings 20 years of experience in various industries including heavy vehicle blogging and dump body manufacturing business. He is working for a company in Mississippi and one of the Nation’s primary manufacturers of dump truck bodies and trailers. Warren offers products and services for the smallest to the largest trucks.