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Renovating your home (especially after damage) can be very costly. Follow these tips to cut down your costs. Read on!
Renovating your home is often a challenging task but a necessary one. If your house has stopped protecting you from bad weather, it might be high time to consider a change. After all, your home should be a safe haven, and it must shelter you and make you feel comfortable. When that ceases to be the case, a renovation may be needed.
While it can seem costly and time-consuming, don’t worry. It is possible to renovate your home efficiently and stay within your budget.
Assess the Damage
The first thing you need to do before starting any project is assess the damage in your house. It’s not enough to see that your kitchen isn’t working properly or that your bathroom is impractical or leaking. It’s vital to understand why things are deteriorating and what can be done to fix them.
An effective renovation project should solve the underlying problems and not merely treat the symptoms. Otherwise, you may find yourself renovating every few years – if not every year.
Assessing the damage goes beyond spotting where things have gone wrong. You need to understand why they’ve gone wrong. Often there is a chain of events. Follow the chain and get to the root of the problem.
Shop Around – Compare Different Contractors
For an effective home renovation project, you’re most likely going to need to hire a contractor. And this will come at quite a cost. However, not all contractors are created equally. Some prioritize quality and customer service over cost-savings while others charge a hefty fee in exchange for timely delivery.
While you don’t want to skimp on quality (otherwise you may be back at it quicker than you’d like and end up paying for the same work twice), if you shop around and compare contractors, you are likely to find one that can accommodate your needs without blowing up your budget.
Make sure you check out the customer reviews. A good site to do that on is Trustpilot. If your home renovation project involves HVAC, heating, and air conditioning repair, check out Air Temp Solutions.
Give Your Home a Retro Look – Reuse Old Items
If you’re going to renovate your home, don’t toss away all your old stuff just yet. You might be able to reuse some items in your new project. Perhaps, you could consider giving your home a vintage or retro look, if not entirely, at least a touch of a classic feel here and there. Not only is this a stylish option, but if you use recycled items to create that look, it can often come at a much lower price than using new, modern furnishings.
Roll Up Your Sleeves – Do What You Can Yourself
Doing the work yourself is more often than not a more cost-effective solution than hiring a contractor. However, home renovation does require a certain skill set and know-how you may not possess. Know your limits and don’t be afraid to delegate. But, at the same time, there are surely some aspects of the renovation project you can do yourself.
When discussing your project with a contractor, make sure you ask specific questions as to what work they will do exactly. Since the cost of the renovation is largely determined by time and labor costs, when the contractor mentions a particular task that you feel you could handle, have the contractor remove that task from the project. The estimate will go down significantly as a consequence.
Always Stay Within Your Budget
Saving money often comes down to pre-planning and preparation. That’s what a budget is. If you plan ahead, know what you want, how much it will cost and stay determined to keep within those parameters, you will save yourself a considerable amount of money in the end.
Contractors, like any kind of business person, will invariably try to upsell – meaning they will want to convince you to spend more than you intend, buy fancy gadgets or pay for the best, most expensive materials. This doesn’t mean they are scam artists. Chances are that the more you spend, the better the materials you choose, the more likely you are to be happy with the end result.
However, if you don’t plan ahead, you will spend money on things that, though they are high in quality, are not things you need or have placed a high importance on. Make sure you determine what you want, exactly, ahead of time and make sure that information is communicated clearly to the contractor before beginning on the project.
The Takeaway
When it comes to your home renovation project, cutting costs is not synonymous with cutting corners. If you skimp on quality – buy inferior materials, pay for unskilled labor – you may find yourself having to do the renovation project over again shortly after you’ve paid for it. And that is the opposite of cost-effective.
Shop around, choose your contractors wisely. and don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. The more of the renovation project you tackle yourself the less costly it is likely to be.
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