Home improvements can be wonderful things. They can result in your home being unique, completely your own, and filled with personal effort and love. They can also be major headaches if you’re not careful. The following will explore a few helpful tips for anyone looking into doing home improvements.
When you’re working on home improvements, you tend to only include the amount of time it will take to complete the improvements and clean up afterwards, but the process is often elongated. Finding and cleaning, and prepping materials might take longer than you expect, but, more crucially, people often encounter surprises when home improvements are underway.
Maybe this means a pipe where there’s no good reason for a pipe to be, but now that you’ve found it, you realize you need to either rework some of your piping or alter your renovation plans. Sometimes this means finding mould or mildew underneath the flooring that you’re tearing up, meaning you need to do an intense clean and have a dehumidifier running for a few days in the space and figure out where the moisture the mould is growing on came from. Expect the improvements to take at least 30% longer than you initially intended.
If you’re going to be doing many different improvements over a span of time, it’s a good idea to put them all in an appropriate order when you’re making your plans. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to do things in a particular order. Typically you want to do flooring and painting last as things can get scratched or chipped amid other repair projects, and if you’ve just put in shiny new floors, you’re going to be mighty annoyed to find that they’ve been all scuffed up as you tore down a wall in the house.
Foundation and roof problems should always be addressed first as these impact the structural integrity of the property, and a good roof can help keep your other improvements protected from water damage. If anything electrical or plumbing-related needs to be tackled, that should be done second as sometimes this work involves cutting holes in walls.
Remember those surprises mentioned above? That extra time can end up costing you more money. Be sure to keep a few home improvement price guides handy to understand what things should cost. But also, keep in mind that you’re likely looking at 30% more than you initially thought something would cost because of the surprises. Sometimes it’s realizing you actually have an antique door frame size and so need to order a special door from several states over.
Sometimes it means discovering a problem behind the walls that need to be addressed before you can continue with your original home improvement plans. When budgeting, be sure to keep in mind how the costs can creep up on you. If you’ve got a gorgeous new kitchen, but it’s going to take you five years to pay for it, you might not love the new space quite so much.