When it comes to spending money on your property, most home owners will consider what will add value to their home. Whether you own your forever home or are using your current property as a stepping stone, making calculated and considered financial decisions can result in your property being worth more than what you invested. We all like a return on our investments, but how is that achieved for your house?
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Part Four of our Dollars and Sense budgeting series, we share about how we spend the budget we have set! We give advice on how we price our reno plans, source products, work with tradies and find ways to save as we spend.
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Budgeting. It’s a love-hate relationship. Caleb “the saver” gets excited about spreadsheets, while Alice “the spender”… not so much! After seven renovations, we have come to value and prioritise the role a budget has within each of our projects.
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The first challenge of our kitchen renovation was that the existing kitchen wasn’t in the right place in the house. It seemed to me the original designer created a 4-bedroom house and then realised he had forgotten to add a kitchen. To correct his oversight, he quickly added some cabinets to the first bedroom he saw and hoped no one would notice. It was hard not to notice a should-be bedroom with cabinets along one wall at the back of the house, when the rest of the living was at the front.
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It was a simple plan, to renovate an existing area to create workspace and the kids to play all on a minimal budget. The to do list was set: give the walls a new coat of paint, install some flooring, lights and blinds. It was then we realised the walls were lined with MDF, leaks through windows, new guttering was required and very few walls were straight. This is where renovation gets difficult and frustrating, when what you expected isn’t the reality. It is here where you need to pause and reset, regardless of what the original plan was - re-evaluate and determine what the new plan is going to be.
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Our fireplace originally stood out for all the wrong reasons, but to replace or remove a perfectly functioning fire place just for looks was not an option for us. So we started our DIY investigation - researching, exploring new ideas and finding products we haven’t used before. The result - our fireplace transformation cost approximately $400 and took us a week to complete by outworking 3 simple projects.
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The success of your vision often lies in a detailed plan with clear objectives to achieve it. Getting yourself prepared and in a position to execute your plan. From when we purchased this house at auction we had 4 weeks to create a detailed plan on how to achieve our vision and begin to put the cogs into motion to achieve this.
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To be honest, the only plan we were intending on making during Alice’s pregnancy was a birth plan, and 2 months out we had the sudden addition of a renovation and a subdivision. We needed a plan, a good one...
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