Preface Your Home Remodeling Dreams With Down-to-Earth Questions
With countless websites, TV shows, and magazines showing off the incredible results of home renovations, you’ve likely found yourself desiring to remodel your own home at one point or another. In most cases, a home remodel is a great idea whether you only do one or two rooms or treat the entire house to a face-lift. Before you embark on this process, ask yourself the hard questions to ensure you’re ready for what lies ahead. To help you think through your decision, here are a few questions to consider.
How Much Will It Cost?
The most important question to get a handle on before you begin remodeling your home is how much it will cost. After all, you don’t want to go into the process blindly and end up with a beautiful home yet be “house-poor” so you don’t have any extra money to enjoy your life in your home. While this is an easy question to ask, it can be one of the most difficult questions to answer, at least without a fair bit of investigation on your part.
Average home renovation costs vary widely depending on your location, the age of your home, the room or rooms you are remodeling, the contractors you choose, and your ability to complete some or all of the work on your own. From a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, there really is no limit to how much you can spend to make your home remodeling dreams come true.
While there is no set cost for a given home remodeling project, there are concrete ways you can save money on these costs. For example, instead of hiring contractors to do everything, you can do some of the work yourself. An important caveat to this suggestion is you should know the limits of your abilities to ensure the project is completed correctly and safely. Another tip to help save money is to re-purpose existing materials in your home or buy new materials from a builder’s surplus store.
In addition to saving money, you should seek out several different contractors to bid on the work you can’t do yourself. Once you obtain several bids, you can compare the prices and reviews of the different contractors to find the best ones for your needs. Remember, though, that if a bid seems too good to be true, it probably is, so take care when comparing contractors.
What Will I Do With My Belongings?
Another important consideration, and one that will help take a lot of stress out of the house remodeling process once it begins, is what you will do with your belongings during the remodel. Here are a few possible options to think through.
Part of the answer to the question of where you’re going to store your belongings stems from how many rooms you plan to remodel. If you’re only going to remodel one or two rooms, you may be able to move your belongings elsewhere in your home, provided other rooms have the space to absorb these extra items. If you’re going to be making major renovations to most or all of your home, though, the answer gets a little more complicated.
One option for your belongings during a whole-home remodel is to push the items in each room to the middle of the room and cover the pile with drop cloths while the space is remodeled around it. Of course, the chance for damage of some sort still exists; plus, if you’re planning on renovating your floors, this isn’t an option. You could try moving your belongings around in your home as the renovation progresses based on where the work is currently being done. However, this results in some kind of strange “furniture dance” that becomes backbreaking and has the potential to cause damage to your belongings.
A better option, in many cases, whether you’re remodeling a few rooms or your whole house, is to pack up your belongings and put them in storage. This option allows you to only move your items in and out of a room once and ensures they are completely safe throughout the entire process. If you can get a few good friends together and bribe them with above-average pizza, you should be able to complete this moving-out process in no time.
What Does the Future Look Like?
While no one can accurately predict the future in its entirety, it does help to do a little “crystal ball gazing” before you begin your remodeling project. If you’re remodeling your home because you plan on sticking around for a while, make sure your remodeled spaces are functional for you now and in the future.
This doesn’t mean you need to have a fully handicap-accessible kitchen or child-proof bathroom installed. However, it should cause you to think through things like cabinet and toilet heights, door widths, floor surfaces, stair accessibility, light switch locations, and plenty of those other small details that can be a challenge for the very old and the very young. In many cases, it’s easier and far less expensive to make small adjustments now instead of making large ones later.
What About Sustainability?
In a world increasingly focused on protecting the environment, it’s important to ask yourself about the materials you’ll use in your home remodel. While sustainably sourced items are often more expensive, the peace of mind you’ll gain from living in a sustainably remodeled home may be worth the extra cost.
Whatever sustainable materials you choose as you remodel your home, make the entire process easier when you use climate controlled storage units provided by a company just as committed to making the world a better place as you are.