There are a great number of things for you to think about before you remodel any room in your home. The first thing you should think about is if the remodel to the room is needed, affordable and wanted. Once you get past that, there are about ten other things that you should be considering prior to remodeling your rooms.
What should I be thinking about when I am remodeling my room?
There are ten major worries or issues that you need to consider when remodeling your room:
- Determine your budget – When remodeling a room, you are going to decide a few things, one of them being budget. If you don’t have the money to complete the job, then you shouldn’t begin any kind of remodeling. Go over the look you want to achieve; the items you already have towards it and the items you still need. Price the materials. Call some contractors and find out what they charge per hour to do the job with materials and without.
Figure out how much you’re going to have to spend and how much you actually have. Put a price on the whole project together. Then you have to figure out how much your monthly expenditures are and how much you make monthly. Subtract your monthly expenditures from your income. Do you have enough left over to meet the figure you came up with to do the remodel?
- Find a drywall contractor you trust, unless you are doing your own remodel, in that case, measure twice – Always do your research on the different drywall contractors available to you if you are going to hire someone. Check reviews, call the place, look at their website, whatever you feel you need to do to get the information you need to decide who you are going to pick for your contractor. You need to trust that your drywall contractor is going to complete the job you hire him to do properly and to your satisfaction. You also need to be able to trust your drywall contractor in your house.
If you are not going to use a contractor and are going with the DIY option then always measure the areas you are going to be working with twice, even three times. People like to think of this as a joke, but believe it, it will not be funny when you cut your carpet too short or you don’t have enough trim to complete a room. If you get the same number two to three times, you are probably okay to start your project.
- Don’t underestimate cosmetic changes – Sometimes people think that smaller cosmetic changes are not big projects, but a lot of the time they are wrong. Have you ever heard someone say something like; ‘I have a room to paint on Saturday.’? When you talked to that same person again and asked how their job went, did they tell you that it took them most of the weekend and not just Saturday? DO NOT underestimate small remodel projects. If you do not think that you can do the job yourself and complete it the way you want, hire a professional you trust.
- Identify a storage solution – If you have items that you are going to be putting back into the newly remodeled room, then you need to think of a storage option until your remodel is complete. If you do not have an attic space, a basement or a shed, then you can investigate renting a storage space. Another option is keeping your items in another room that is not being remodeled.
- Pare down, pack up and gather your most important things – Sort the items in your room to be remodeled. Make four piles: Give away, throw away, keep and store. Obviously, you will be throwing away the throw away stuff and not packing it. Put keep into regular boxes. These are the items you will want to get temporary storage for, or put them into your attic, basement or a spare room. Store items that you are not going to be using practically throughout the year but would like to keep. Since these items are going into long term storage, they need to be stored in plastic boxes, totes and containers.
This will ensure that rats and bugs will not be making nests in your Christmas decorations. Last but not least, by any means, giveaway. You may not want to give away your things but think of it in this light; your items will be going to someone who can use them when you don’t or aren’t going to anymore, the items that you bought will live on and not go to waste, your stained shirt or jeans that are slightly too large for you could make a homeless person very happy and you will have more space, or, more space for new things.
- Take an audit of your belongings – An audit of your belongings is basically just writing out a list of all your valuables. This is so that if anything at all happens to come up missing or broken, you can either get the item back or the money for it from your homeowner’s insurance. Hiring a contractor you trust is recommended as number two on this list, but sometimes when you think you can trust someone you can’t.
- Put rolling storage units to work – Rolling storage units can be classified as a bunch of different things. There are plastic shelving units with wheels on them, plastic totes with wheels on them and all sorts of other types of wheeled plastic storage bins. It is much easier to relocate while you’re remodeling.
- Use up all of the consumables that you can – If you have food and you are remodeling your kitchen, eat it, give away, do whatever you have to in order for it not to go to waste. If you are remodeling your bathroom then you should use up your bathroom consumables and so on. Consumables are items that are consistently used and bought or items that have shorter expiration dates.
- Beef up home security and protect your privacy – If you are going to be leaving people at your home, even if they are workers, you need to make sure you can see what they are doing while you’re not there. Of course, you don’t want to be creepy and spy on them constantly, however, you do want to stop that worker that just entered your bedroom and grabbed your unmentionables for his private use later. For this you need cameras that can record but that can also be watched from a viewing system you hook up, normally it is your phone or computer.
You also need to make sure that all legal documents are put safely away in a locked space. Passports, licenses, marriage licenses, birth certificates and social security cards are all legal documents that need protection from others. You also are going to want to lock the doors of the rooms that are not being worked in, and possibly set some limits with the contractor about entering and exiting the house.
- Keep ideas, contracts and receipts organized digitally and on paper – This is as basic as it can get. Anything you are given digitally save it o a flash drive AND your computer, then print it and keep it in a folder. Anything that you get on paper scan it or take a picture and save it to a flash drive AND your computer. If in the event you ever must go to court, you have everything you need nice and neatly organized.
Basically, the different rooms in your house serve different functions and should all look the way that you want them to look. The rooms in your house should feel comfortable to you and look enough like you, that visitors to the space know it is your space. You should feel proud of your home and all of the rooms in it, but what should you think about prior to doing anything to any room in your house?
– This is a guest post not written by the websites’ owner.