As much as we love those home renovation shows on TV, if we’re honest with ourselves, we all know we probably won’t be able to do anything like that ourselves. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never even picked up a paintbrush in your life, you’ll know that the TV shows that get watched the most all have a budget much larger than yours.
That massive disparity between your dreams and your bank balance can be offset by some clever thinking and a bit of research. It will also, unfortunately, involve you getting your hands dirty.
1. Reuse material to save on one of your biggest expenses
Apart from labor, the biggest cost you’ll encounter while doing a renovation is the amount you’ll be spending on materials. Once you know that, it doesn’t take a massive leap to know that this is where you can make some significant savings.
The fewer new items you need to buy, the greater saving you will make. This does not involve going through piles of rubble to salvage timber or bricks, but instead things like your kitchen units. Most kitchen cabinet carcasses are the same, so if they are in good repair, you can reuse the ones you have.
The same thing goes for the bathroom, where one white suite looks very much like another, and changing the lower cost items around them like tiling and faucets can make your bathroom look like new without anybody having to pick up a monkey wrench.
2. Repair rather than replace where you can
As a follow-on from the last point, it is also far cheaper to repair rather than replace. Just because it looks or sounds broken to you, you’re not an expert. So, you need to ask one. If, for instance, part of your renovation plan was to replace your HVAC system (after all, does anyone really think that theirs works properly?), then you could be looking at a lot of unnecessary expense.
It might need repairing (or even a minor overhaul) to be working as good as new, so reaching out to a local, reliable duncan air conditioning company, if, for instance, you lived in Duncanville, Texas, or one in St. Augustine, Florida if you lived there, could save you enough money to buy some high-end pieces as the perfect finishing touches
3. Put high-end finishing touches to standard features
If you walk into a room and on the table is a high-end vase from the front page of that magazine, you are probably not going to notice the table or chairs too much, but you’re going to assume that anybody who bought that vase would have good taste in furniture. As another example, you could use slightly lower quality kitchen cabinets (or even re-use the old ones as recommended above), but by putting a high-end ‘name’ refrigerator in there too, visitors will also notice this and assume the rest of the room is also high-end too.
These three tips might not save you a fortune, but they could bring the dream of a home renovation that bit closer.
