7 Tips For Completely Renovating Your Home FOR LESS!
Budget your way into a dreamy home upgrade
Let me start by saying that it is absolutely AMAZING that I have the chance to share these tips with you because not too long ago, completely renovating a home seemed like something I could only tackle if I hit the Florida Jackpot. Well, I have some good news for you, you don’t have to win the lottery in order to make some dreamy upgrades to your home!
Ok, let's jump into these tips that I hope will light your pathway to a low cost, much awaited home upgrade.
1. Start by saving
Having a nice chunk of money to start your home improvements will defiantly help kickstart your project with less pauses. For me, I was able to save about $15,000 within 8 months by staying focused on the goal, a dreamy updated home. Having this savings allowed me to get my project momentum going at a nice pace. In my case, I had to overhaul the plumbing, electrical, and central air in order to make sure the foundation and basic amenities were good to go. If your home already has a great foundation, CONGRATULATIONS! You will able to focus your savings on the cosmetic aspects of your home, which tends to cost less and is always the most fun part!
2. Apply for a Personal Line of Credit
Believe it or not, I had not heard of a Personal Line of Credit (PLOC) before I decided to dive into my home renovation process. A revolving PLOC gives you access to money that replenishes as you pay off your balance. For example, if your PLOC is $5,000 and you use $1,500 of that credit, you now have $3,500 in credit left. Now, let's say you decide to pay the total outstanding balance of $1,500 when it is time for you to make a PLOC payment, you would now have access to $5,000 again! Isn’t that awesome? A PLOC will give you an opportunity to do your home renovations even if you don’t have a chunk of your own money available, or if you run out of your savings. It’s all about planning and budgeting and trust me, it can be done :-)
3. Renovate in phases
Dividing your home renovation project into phases is an excellent idea, and can give you a financial breather during the process. Decide what parts of your home are used the most and start there. For example, if you love to entertain and frequently have dinners and game nights with friends, start with your living room and guest bathroom. If you are the only one who enters areas like your bedroom and garage, then those areas can be done in a later phase. You know how you use your home, so how you phase your renovations is all up to you!
4. Beware of contractor prices
One of the most significant lessons I learned during my home renovation process was to look for contractors with set prices instead of those with hourly or daily rates. The fact of the matter is, you can easily get trapped by a contractor who drags the project out for a longer period of time than necessary simply to make more money. This is bad news for you if your goal is to do this project within a certain budget. Do your research and price out the jobs that you are looking to have done. If a contractor gives you a set price that works for your budget, I suggest hiring them to do the job. Having a set price for a job allows you to budget much better than not knowing if the contractor will be working for 3 days or 3 months at $200 a day!
5. Enlist your family and friends
In my experience, the most costly aspect of my renovations was not the cost of materials, but labor costs. If you have a handy spouse, friends or family you can save a TON by having them help you with some of your projects. You can even make it fun by ordering pizza and having some good drinks after the day is complete (on the house of course).
6. Turn something old into something new
A little bit of paint, bedazzling, and decorative contact paper can go a LONG WAY. You can try painting furniture or picture frames to give your home a fresh look! Try rearranging furniture in a room, or even swapping pictures out and placing them in different areas of the house. The possibilities are endless when working with what you already have.
7. Finally, Have patience and enjoy the process
Many of the home improvement shows we see on TV can make renovations seem like they happen within a week or so, but if you are jumping into a complete home renovation like I did, this is far from reality. Major home renovations can take time, but that's ok! Have fun documenting the journey and take a bunch of pictures. It is so rewarding to scroll through your picture library and see the amazing progress of your renovations over time; that is something that definitely kept me motivated.
Remember, you don’t have to be a millionaire to create your dream space and add value to your home. Make a plan, stay positive, and believe that it can happen. Happy Home Renovating!
About the Creator
Maya Holton
A real person living real life. I want to share the lessons I learn with all who will listen.
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For The Graduates...There is More
What is graduation? When we graduate we move to the next level. It’s a time of celebration because we have the opportunity to declare that we have mastered where we were previously and now we have enough knowledge to move forward. It’s natural to feel like a conqueror after graduating to the next level, standing on top of a mountain of pride, driving a flag into the ground with your chin held high. What a glorious feeling! We should take time to enjoy the view on the top of that mountain and even invite some of our loved ones up to share the view with us. Being at the top of that mountain feels good, and though you worked hard through blood, sweat and tears to get there, I am here to tell you that you cannot stay there. You see after you have climbed a mountain and reached the summit you must come down because there are an infinite amount of other mountains for you to climb. It’s time to make a transition and begin preparation for a new climb. Transition is the point in your journey where you are no longer in the familiar past, but now you are tiptoeing into an unfamiliar future. Transitioning into the future can be exciting and motivating, but who wouldn't admit that sometimes it can be intimidating and scary? What happens when you are in the middle of a transition and things start to get a little shaky? It’s funny how we can sometimes have incredible drive to reach something new, but once we reach the new, that drive turns in fear or doubt just because the new it not familiar. You see, our emotions have a sneaky way of trying to throw us off during transitions when we were initially excited about our future. Our emotions can pull us back to the past because there is where we felt safe, there is where we were sure of ourselves, and there is where we were answering questions instead of asking them. You see, life has taught me that though you should definitely take things you have learned the past into your future for tools, but after a while, you must try not to reference back to the past as a whole. It is time for a new thing. I recently witnessed a person who had worked in their profession for a number of years with one organization start the same type of work with a new organization. This person had a wealth of knowledge and could probably write a bestselling book about how to perform every task perfectly…at their OLD job….I observed this person getting frustrated as they struggled with opening up to learning new things. This person started to reference things from their old job trying to make it fit at their present place of employment. This person was still picturing themselves standing at the top of the previous mountain they conquered while trying to climb a new one. “Well this is how I used to do it”, “When I was at my old job we used to it this way”, “Where I was before it didn’t take that long to get it done”, "I am not used to this pace"….Listen, you can either fight through transition or you can grow through it. I want to encourage you to push past those emotions that may come during this in -between time; the time between knowing something back there so well and not knowing what's ahead very much or at all. Transition is preparation, and whatever we do, we must fight not to turn back because it stops our growth. We must fight not to mentally keep ourselves bound to that mountain that we already concurred because that cuts us off from all the other amazing mountains there are for us to climb. 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So after basking in the glory of my victory and waving my flag high at my own Yoshi parade I took the game out of the console and searched in my box of games for something new to play. The next game that caught my attention was called Zelda and it was about a prince whose job was to rescue a princess in this enchanted world. So I loaded Zelda into the game console and I waited for my character to pop into this little world for me to explore. I loved how this game looked, it was beautiful. There were huge green trees and flowing streams of sparkling blue water with cute little huts sitting nearby. The scenery was just so amazing to me, so I was excited to explore the rest of the game! I picked up my game controller, cracked my game playing thumbs and set out on a virtual adventure. First I made my character, Zelda, run around a huge rock because I wanted to see what was on the other side, and then suddenly the game paused and some words popped up on the screen, some instructions of some sort. So I read the instructions and said, “Ok, got it! Let’s play...I got a princess to save and hopefully another victory parade to attend so there is no time to waste!" I continued playing and about a minute later, I came upon a little troll looking character and the game stopped me again and more words came up on the screen. “More reading??? I wanna play”, I said to myself. So I took a deep breath and read whatever this character had to say, I’m sure it was some good advice to help me win that level, but I don’t remember because I was trying to play not read! So I keep going running through the forest, hoping over the sparkling blue streams until I got to the entrance of a cave. "Oh this is going to be good", I said. Yoshi story didn't have caves, Zelda has caves this is about to be EPIC...Then suddenly the game paused AGAIN and more words popped up on the screen. I threw that Nintendo controller and said, “You know what, I’ve had about enough of this. I can't even play the game because it wants me to read! I just came from school where I was reading ALL DAY. I think not." Frustrated and in need of a pick-me-up, I pulled that Zelda game out of that Nintendo and quickly found Yoshi Story so that I could beat the entire game in 10 minutes and have a song and parade without having to read ANYTHING becasue I knew that game like the back of my hand. I lost count on how many times I beat Yoshi Story after my attempt at Zelda. Had my parents known that I was only going to play that one game they could have saved a lot of money. But I wonder though… what I might have encountered if I would have stuck it out through Zelda…How great might my game playing skills might have been if I pushed past that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing and understood that Zelda was a more advanced game than Yoshi Story, so it required more reading, and more patience. I don’t know if there was a parade at the end of Zelda because I gave up before I got there. I was uncomfortable with the transition from one game to the next so I ran back to the one that was familiar. I wanted a victory at a new place using the same skills from my past but I needed new skills and that was going to require more work. I had to leave my old mountain behind to climb a new one. Sometimes we don’t get the promise that is in our future because we refuse to go through that uncomfortable phase of transition. 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