7 Tips on Renovating Your Home on a Budget

Renovating your home can drastically improve the quality of life in your household and boost the resale value of the place, at the same time. Both of these things are more effective when you do them on a budget. For the resale value, it’s quite self-explanatory – the lower the investment the better the ROI. When it comes to quality-of-life improvements, if you manage to save some money, you can make more improvements or you can spend a bit more someplace else. All in all, here are the top seven tips on renovating your home on a budget.

Paint on your own

Painting on your own sounds quite intimidating but it can be quite simple with a couple of tricks up your sleeve. For instance, you first need to do the preparation of the room, pick the right color and buy all the right equipment. Next, you should wait for dry weather so that you can let the room breathe and that it can dry as rapidly as possible. Most importantly, you need to protect your furniture and surrounding areas. Otherwise, the cleanup will take longer than the painting itself. Keep in mind that if you want to save time and money while making a stylish impression, you can always go for accent paint.

Rearrange furniture

The simplest way to change the overall layout within your home is to simply rearrange furniture around the place. This is a complete inexpensive method of redesigning your place, especially due to the fact that the original layout may have some flaws. For instance, the current layout may have been set by the previous owner/tenant, which will give you an opportunity to put a personal stamp on the area. Even if this was not the case, you still have a chance to explore other options.

Furniture restoration

A furniture restoration project is a multi-pronged challenge. First, you need to find the right piece of restorable furniture. For this, you need to search through garage sales, flea markets and online merchants. Then, you need to learn how to look past the current potential of the item and see what it can become. Third, you need to try and figure out how this particular piece will fit your general layout. Once all of this is done, you need to learn how to properly restore a furniture piece in question, as well as how to subsequently make it fit your layout.

Lease equipment instead of buying

When working on your own property or hiring someone else to help you out, chances are that you’ll still need to provide some materials handling equipment. The thing is that, for instance, if you need a forklift to move pallets with materials around, buying this piece of equipment would definitely be too excessive. Instead, you should look for a forklift lease. This way, you get to save the money and return the forklift once you no longer use it. If you ever find yourself in need of a forklift again, you’ll know where to find it.

Budget-friendly style

There are some styles that are budget-friendly, to begin with. For instance, we’ve already talked about furniture restoration and these items fit rustic and shabby chic styles the best. Going full vintage or Victorian is the opposite of this, seeing as how well-preserved antiques tend to be quite expensive. Another great budget-friendly idea is to go for minimalism. The equation here is quite simple, seeing as how you can decorate the entire area with fewer items and elements.

Repair instead of replacing

There are some appliances and fixtures that are the lifeline of your household. Once they break down, you will have to find a solution. Now, from the perspective of a renovation, it would make sense to just get a new appliance and settle this problem for good. From the budgeting perspective, it’s usually better to consider a repair. Aside from this, you need to understand that the original item was probably picked to fit the overall décor. Finding a suitable replacement would, therefore, be even harder.

Cost-to-value comparison

The last thing you need to take into consideration is the cost-to-value. This is the cost-effectiveness equivalent when making upgrades that will boost your quality of life within the home. You see, renovating in order to boost the resale value is a lot simpler. All you need to do is perform brief research on the ROI that a certain home improvement project will bring and there you have it. The value provided by an upgrade, on the other hand, is far more subjective. Therefore, you need to approach it a lot more carefully.

In conclusion

Saving money is only possible if you decide to invest in something else. Usually, it’s your own time, effort and creativity. So, before you decide whether it’s worth it, you also need to think about the investment that you’re actually making. It’s also relevant that you remember that the end results will always differ when saving money. Rearranging yourself is not the same as hiring a professional designer, same as restoring old furniture is not the same as buying new pieces.