To start, ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish with your home renovations? Are you looking to add space for your family, a business office, or even increase the value of your home by remodeling and updating important areas?
By figuring out why you want to do the home renovations, you will better be able to plan your renovation so that it does not break your budget.
Take a look at some steps to take in planning your remodeling project:
Price Out the Home Renovations
A good place to start is by figuring out what the approximate value of your home is. This is important because as a general rule, you should not spend more on each room than what that room is valued at in the percentage of your overall home value.
For example, it can help to know that a kitchen generally accounts for 10-15 percent of the overall property value. This means that you should not spend more than that 10-15 percent on a kitchen renovation.
Stick to Your Plan
One of the easiest ways to blow the budget on a renovation is by adding “extras” into your project. Your plan might not have called for different lighting, but now that you have updated other areas of the room you may be tempted to update the lighting as well. These type of decisions tend to snowball until your final result looks very different from your original plan.
That is not to say that you should not love the finished result. You are paying for this so of course you better enjoy it.
The problem is when you deviate from what you have budgeted, it can easily get out of control. That is why you need to do your homework up front.
Decide if you will be doing the labor yourself or it you will use a contractor. Even if you are leaning towards doing the work yourself, it is a good idea to get multiple quotes from contractors. They might see things that you have not, and their proposals could end up being affordable enough that you would rather hire it out.
The more legwork and research you do at this step, the more likely you will be to stick to your plan.
Plan on Unforeseen Costs
No matter how hard you try to plan, most home renovations will have small unforeseen costs come up. You cannot see through walls, and oftentimes when you get started tearing up a wall or floor, there will be other issues that need to be addressed.
These unforeseen issues can be stressful and time consuming, but plan on allowing an extra 10 to 20 percent on top of your budget in case of emergencies. In the best case scenario you will not have to use this money, but if you do need it, at least you have it ready.
