When making improvements to our homes, we often look at the costs involved in doing the necessary work to achieve the result we’d like – whether that be one room or an entire house. You’ll also likely spend time shopping around, taking care with decisions which have cost present implications.
This is a wise approach as there are lots of ways to make savings on your home improvements which don’t impact your desired look and feel. For example – choosing to replace your kitchen cupboard doors instead of the entire unit, by selecting your choice of board and enlisting the help of a professional MDF cutting service, which has the potential to save you huge amounts of money.
What isn’t always obvious though is the necessary consideration for making longer term savings, i.e. how the choices you’re making now will potentially impact you financially in the future. As an example – choosing trending design concepts which you will likely want to change when they’re out of date.
Here are some of the important areas to help ensure your home renovations are budget friendly both now and in the future.
Planning with future proofing in mind
The most important to step in achieving long term savings is to spend a chunk of your time on planning, rather than rushing into work itself. Thoroughly plan out each room, each requirement and what you need to accomplish with the following in mind:
- Your current budget
- How this might affect the future sale of your property
- Your future needs if your situation changes
- If this is something that will still be desirable in 10 years’ time
To give you an idea – If one of your renovations is to refurbish your bathroom and you’d really love to get rid of the bath and replace with a shower or maybe a steam shower, because you personally love showers. Consider if this is something that would appeal to future potential buyers if you had to sell your house? What if you have a family, bathing your kids could be challenging without a bath?!
You get the idea, just ask yourself some future based questions to ensure your current choices won’t be too costly in the future.
Care with design trends
It can be easy to get sucked into trending design ideas and approaches, feature walls and quirky patterns all seem like a great idea at the time until a few years later when you hate the sight of it! The term ‘trend’ actually means always changing/developing, meaning you’ll likely need to change it at some stage.
Whilst this can be rectified relatively easily, some aspects can mean a fair amount of time and money to change – like kitchen or bathroom tiles, flooring etc, so choose wisely.
The best approach to take to anything that will take both time and money to change, is to keep it classic and neutral, rather than choose trending patterns, materials or colours.
However, trending styles are not completely off the table just focus these on elements such as soft furnishing which are relatively in expensive to replace.
Thorough Approach
Ultimately, always aim to achieve a quality finish, skipping corners may seem like a good way to make savings but in the long term these can end up costing more. Things like plumbing and electrics are really not areas to try and make savings.
Be sure to prioritise your budget on these areas and enlist professional help rather than doing it yourself, if you don’t have the knowledge and expertise.
