When Your Home Needs A Face Lift,
How Do You Get Started?
The moment you realize your home doesn’t look the way you want, you’re going to want to try a hundred different things to improve it. Maybe a kitchen renovation? Or a rehaul on the garden landscaping? Could new windows make a difference? Or maybe give it just a fresh lick of paint all the way round? The choices you have when it comes to home improvement projects are endless!
But that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? There’s so much you could do, but what should you actually do? And where on earth do you start? It’s a bit of a headache to plan out, and you haven’t even gotten to the actual renovation plan yet!
However, we can make it a bit easier to find a good starting point for your home’s impending face lift. From the moment you realize your home needs work to the actual start of the project planning stage, here are a few tips on making the work a lot simpler to approach.
Think: What’s Really Bothering You?
This is the very first step to focus on. When there’s a whole house worth of work to be done (or so it feels like), what would you say is the main thing that’s bothering you? When you think about your home’s face lift needs, what instantly jumps to mind?
Whatever it is that comes to the forefront first, time and time again, is the project that should probably get first dibs.
For example, when you think ‘home improvement’, maybe you instantly think of the shoddy carpet in the living room? If so, that’s the job you should get to work on before any others.
Similarly, if you think of the kitchen and how there’s such little space to do anything, you might be overdue an extension.
All in all, focus on the projects that spring up first – and have been springing up like that for a long while now. These are the issues that are making you feel less than house proud.
Is There Anything That Needs Working on ASAP?
Some ‘home improvement’ jobs are actually just repairs that should have been done yesterday! As such, when you’re thinking about the things around your home that bother you, double check whether or not the projects in question are actually jobs.
The piping that runs round the downstairs bathroom; the piping that’s always burning hot to the touch and you keep stubbing your toe on because it sticks out? That’s a plumbing issue that needs a fix, and not just an aesthetic issue ruining the flow of the bathroom!
Pick an Area, Call an Expert
Now the immediate work is (hopefully) out of the way, you can turn your attention toward the projects you’d like to do.
But once again, you may run into a bit of a choice paralysis here, so we recommend listing out the renovations, mini improvements, and other jobs in order of how long they’ll take, how expensive they’ll be, and whether or not you could get them done DIY.
And while it may seem like the easiest, cheapest, and quickest of the jobs should go at the top, we recommend putting the opposite there! Make sure the most expensive, time consuming, and ones that would need a professional’s hand go toward the top of the list.
These are the areas you’ll want to focus on next, while you’ve got the most time and budget to do so. And now that’s sorted out, it’s time to just pick an area and call an expert skilled in it!
If any structural work needs doing, such as exterior remodeling projects like getting your roof relaid or your siding replaced, it should go at the top. Smaller, interior jobs like repainting the living room can go near the bottom.
Get a Rough Budget Together
Now you have the necessary work done, and you’ve contacted an expert about the improvement project you’re focusing on, you can use the estimate they’ve given you to put a rough budget together.
This is hard to do without that estimate in the first place, as you need to know what the general going rate is. And seeing as most tradespeople require you to get in touch, do so!
This is also your chance to find out what’s included in the price breakdown that isn’t just labor costs, i.e., materials, potential fixes that might be uncovered in the process, etc. The more you know about these things, the better your rough budget will be!
Get Started
After all that’s done, you can actually, finally, get started. Put your improvement plan together, see if your budget is going to cover all the costs, and get the work all sorted.
After all of the research you’ve had to do up until this point, you’ll certainly be glad to see that your efforts have paid off, and with very little stress or back and forth on top!
When Your Home Needs a Face Lift, Go Step by Step
So, to go back to the question at the top of this article: when your home needs a face lift, how do you get started?
By going step by step. Start with what you feel is wrong, then separate out any jobs that need to be done for the sake of your property’s structural integrity. Those are the kind of repairs that need completing as soon as possible.
But once that work is out of the way, you can head back to column A. Try to rank what’s in by order of priority, and even get loved ones to pitch in to help you decide. Once you have, pick the home improvement at the top, and get an expert to weigh in on what needs to be done.
This is where you can start to put a budget together, as well as a schedule for how work can proceed. And once those details are down on paper, you can actually get started!
