Renovations Sound Great – But What About The Hit To Your Lifestyle?
Anyone that has planned a significant home renovation knows just how many moving parts can be in motion here. Planning a wedding seems relatively tame by comparison. After all, unless you’re highly experienced and skilled in construction, including the trades like plumbing and electrical work, odds are that you’re not going to renovate the home yourself. That said, renting power tools and other machinery is possible as an individual, and that might give you some more wriggle room that can help you.
If you live in the home also, the timeline may be elongated so that you can keep plugging away at the project piece by piece. But there’s one thing to consider that rarely gets a mention in many home renovation advice columns – what about the hit to your lifestyle? It’s doable but rather difficult to live in an active building site, and certainly unsuitable for children or the elderly to be in a home undergoing heavy construction.
In this post, then, we’ll discuss the practical elements of living in a home going through this, and what you might do about it:
Storing Your Possessions
A home renovation is often messy, and requires the movement of furniture, the pulling up of the floors, knocking down or improving the structural integrity of the walls, and perhaps pulling out entire units like the kitchen cabinet suite.
For this reason, it’s good to ensure your personal possessions are safe and not precariously placed in a storage room in the house. You can achieve that using storage units that are properly secured, provide ample space, and allow you to commit to your work without having to worry about damage or fire hazards.
Purchasing a range of boxes, placing like items together, labelling them appropriately, and then storing them for a set time can be a good way to begin. Thankfully, many storage options are incredibly cheap, meaning that long-term storage isn’t going to be much of an addition to your renovation budget. Moreover, this can save you countless examples of losing out on your personal property and needing to replace it, which may in effect have cost more than it would do to store those items for a month.
Inspecting The Home Correctly
It’s important to make sure there are no annoying hits to your renovation schedule unless planned for appropriately and justified carefully. That’s why ensuring the necessary areas of the home are inspected ahead of time can be a wise investment, particularly if you’re planning a large renovation.
The last thing you need is to demolish part of the property only to realize that it was suffering deep foundational slide or subsidence, and this needs attending to on top of that. A capable home inspector will be able to identify issues like this and make you aware of any issues you need to attend to – be that deep dampness in your crawlspaces, rot or damaged wood in your timber beams, or leaks that have been taking place under your shower without you noticing.
Consider Utilities & Downtime
It’s also important to consider the utilities you use while in the property, and how to manage that as you renovate. For instance, it may be that having a secondary network cable placed in another area of the house will allow you to move your router. This means that you’ll have internet access in half of the house you’re living in while the other half is worked on.
From there, you can also plan downtime, such as how long you might be without electricity while certain areas are rewired. This way, you can plan to be away from the house for the day, or make alternate arrangements. Of course, renovations might also be a good time to change which provider you work with, ensuring that you opt for a better tariff. In some cases you might not have consumer choice – for instance, the water supply to your home will most likely be managed by one service.
Your Home’s Security
Let’s say you knock down the outer wall of your property because it needs to be renovated. Okay, well, odds are the new wall isn’t going to be constructed in one day, or rather, the twelve or more hours of sunlight you have that day.
This means that at night, there’s a pretty glaring security problem. This is why making provisions for security gates and protected fence provisions can help you better secure this part of your home, ensuring that no one is able to access your home without a great deal of noise, and without being fully illuminated by motion-sensitive light. Regardless, great installation of those fences should prevent people from getting through even if they wanted to. This is why commercial buildings can be half-built for a little while because they have been adequately secured with good planning.
Separate Accommodation
Of course, sometimes you might need to live elsewhere for a couple of days, such as when the wall is being knocked down to render the space as an open-plan living environment.
In some circumstances, you may have a little flexibility in terms of how you live off-site. If half of the building can be lived in, if you have a spare bedroom, en suite and spare kitchen side, then you might be able to make something work. You might also live in a serviceable motorhome on the property for a week while the job is attended to, and this can be cheaper than a hotel for a certain amount of time.
It might just be that you send your children to live with their grandparents for three days while you deal with the heaviest work alongside the labourers you’ve hired. In the long run, you’ll thank yourself for making these plans, and they absolutely will have an effect, because you deserve to feel comfortable despite this transitory period.
Components Of Construction
There’s no rule that states you have to renovate the whole house at once unless it’s a wreck, but that’s unlikely to be the case if you’ve been living there comfortably. In fact, you might be able to fit certain important elements now, like sorting out the wiring in a given room, then the flooring, then the larger installations of smart home appliances or the media room you’ve been planning.
In some cases, a job is better off being completed in one whole suite of efforts, but in others, you’ll be able to take an incremental step towards them. Let’s say you hope to renovate your bedroom and large study into one big space, while one half of the room is designed you might move into the other, and vice versa.
Just remember, however, that paying to have a good amount of work done in one go will usually net you a better quote on behalf of your materials cost (thanks to personal economies of scale), and because contractors look to take on large projects and are willing to negotiate the price down just a little to secure the contract and compete.
Preparing The Exterior Property
It’s essential to make sure your exterior property is prepared for the comings and goings of materials, labourers, and other day-to-day activities you might expect. So for instance you might remove your driveway gate from its hinges so larger palettes of truck-delivered materials can be accessed, or you might add wooden planks to the muddy lead up to your main driveway so cars can access it more easily.
In some cases you might add fences as discussed above, warning signs based on the construction area, or simply park your car down the street a little to prevent the chance of damage and allow the contractors to park their own utility vehicles closer to the home. In many cases, you’ll hire a skip or other large receptacle for debris, and this will take up a great deal of room on top of that.
Architectural Support & Planning
One of the best decisions anyone developing a home renovation can make before they even start the project is hiring an architect. This might sound like an optional expense, and it can be if you know what you’re doing – but most people don’t know what they’re doing unless they have thorough experience in this field.
That’s not to dismiss your talents, it’s just that an architect is better off at making sure the space is utilized correctly, that building compliance and fire safety is considered, that the space is unusable nad comfortable, and that all of those plans can be submitted perfectly to your building or housing authority so your plans gain permission for further development.
While architects tend to know how to charge quite capably, their fees are overwhelmingly worth it for a steady base to your project which gives you a solid direction and instructions when hiring contractors. For all the convenience they bring, your project may save months of dead time. If that doesn’t bring value, it’s hard to know what would.
With this advice, we hope you can renovate in the best and most confident way.
