TopRenoHome Renovation Guide

You decided to renovate your home?

You wish to make a fast, high quality and inexpensive renovation? What is necessary for this?

The first problem you need to solve is finding a good contractor. If you do not have a close relative who is an owner of a construction company, the best thing to do is begin searching precisely among your relatives and friends. At the worst, find out who recently had a renovation done and what renovation services they used. While choosing your service, first of all you need to pay close attention to the correlation of price and quality.

Other difficulties you might come across?

First of all, you have to figure out what is more important for you: a strictly defined price amount, which you are ready to spend on the renovation of your house or if you don’t worry about the money matters and you would like to create and design something which will actually satisfy you and make you happy. Although, all this is just theoretically speaking and in practice everything might end up completely different. For example, after spending a specific amount of money you might get the exact results that satisfied your requirements or you might end up not liking the work at all and even though everything might seem like the way it should be you still might not like the finished work.

Finding and choosing your employees.

The best recommendation from any recruit team is the living personal experience. So before choosing a team, ask around people who have already done a renovation and are satisfied with the finished work.

Here you will face the difficulty of choosing a self employed working team or having to turn for some help to a construction company. There a negative and positive feedbacks of both decisions. If you hire self employed workers the price will be significantly lower, however the high quality of work will be relevant to the price. If you choose a company you will pay more, however top quality will be guaranteed.

If you didn’t get lucky enough, and there are no contractors among you family and friends or nobody had a recent renovation to advise you a good working team, the only thing you could do is hire someone you don’t know. There are several ways of verifying your workers even at the stage of signing your contract. Try to demand something unrealistic. If they agree with you on everything, you must pay close attention. Firmly insist on conclusion and signing of the agreement ‘before’ and not ‘after’ or ‘later’ work commencement. Ask as much questions as possible, include logic and demand detailed explanations. Don’t fear to seem incompetent, after all, you are not the expert, and that’s why you turned for the professional service, so you are not obliges to know everything in this field.

Estimation of working period and working material

From the very begging you will have to agree with the unpredictable or rather high estimate of working period and working accomplishment. The reason for that is that a residential renovation, whatever condition it might be in previously, could bring many unpredictable surprises. The most inoffensive of them is cricked walls. The reparation of cricked walls is extra time and might not be estimated in the beginning of the agreement.

Just in case you don’t know, find out what major changes you can make in your home, since some residential buildings do not allow renovation changes, or be prepared that at any day you could have a visit from the inspection and might have to restore everything the way it was. The best thing to do is get an approval of your renovation changes in order to avoid any misconceptions and difficulties.

While purchasing any kind of working material and devices, pay close attention to things like rosettes, switches, ventilation ridges. It might only seem that they are worth a cent but in the end you will end up with a fair price amount. Always leave a reserve for the unexpected expenditures, since something can always break, not fit well, there might not be enough of some material or you might simply want to change the installed part to something else.

Tools for the team must be discussed separately: weather if they use yours or their own. The best thing is when the workers use their own tools, especially if they have to use something expensive in order to get the job done. And by the way! A good working team always has a good set of their own tools.

Purchasing materials would most likely be better where your team leader suggests you; in fact he should know the best and cheapest store. Make your purchases with your employee, that way you will be familiar with the pricing of all materials and have more control over your spending money.

Control. Control? Control!

While your working team is going to build your new home, you job is to watch and control their progress 24 hours a day. Be prepared for this beforehand. It is very important for you to remember that you are the customer, who is paying for their work, so don’t be afraid to demand good quality and satisfying results. Use any possibility to appear in the house at the most unexpected time. This will save you from slow working rates and low quality results.

Have a great and successful renovation!