Progress photos

I realised I hadn't posted any after photos so here are a couple so far!

Bathroom

Kitchen & Dining Room

Selecting heating/cooling

Selecting heating and cooling for your house is a big decision that has an impact on both the value of your house as well as determining how much it will cost you in utility bills.

The two big players in the game are split system or ducted systems. Before I started I didn't really understand the difference so here is a brief overview of  what they are about.

Split System

(Info from Lookforthetick)
The most common residential split-system air conditioner is an air conditioning unit made up of two units — an outside unit, the compressor, and an inside air outlet unit, usually referred to as the “wall hung head unit”. The two units are connected by pipes that carry refrigerant. An alternative to the standard unit is the multi-split system, which has multiple indoor units connected to a single outdoor unit. A split-system air conditioner can be used for cooling and heating.

How to lay laminate flooring

Laying laminate flooring yourself is a great way to save money on your Reno. Paying someone to lay your floorboards can cost upwards of $2000. We bought these floorboards from Masters at a reasonable price and had a builder friend show us how to lay them properly. A tip when buying your flooring, look for thicker and wider boards, they are easier to work with and it means you don't need to lay as many! The thicker the boards (ours of 12mm, standard is 8mm thick) the better the acoustics, especially in open plan living areas. You also save money on underlay as you won't need premium underlay if using thicker boards.

Tools required:

It's the little things...

Here's my list of 5 small and inexpensive changes that have big impact in a home renovation: 

1. Fresh paint - This is a change that is both cost effective and produces immediate results to both the look and feel of a room.  

How to budget for your reno

The most important factor in renovating is how much money you have to spend on the renovation. Once you have identified this amount, you then need to decide how you are going to spend the money, and look at how far it will allow your project to go.

Before we got the keys to our house, we scoped out our project  and came up with a list of costs to make a budget for the renovation to make sure we knew how much we could do with the funds we had.

This is the budgeting process we used:
1. Walk-through of your home and identify the projects and renovations that you would like to do.

To move or not to move?

One of the big questions for most renovators is whether or not they should live in the house they are renovating or move out. For us we didn't have a choice, the house was unlivable - no working bathroom, kitchen or floors so living there was not an option.

The biggest factor in determining this is what sort of renovations you are planning on undertaking, for example, renovating your en suite while you have a working bathroom is not something that you will need to move out for. But if the scope of your project is long term and will require numerous rooms to be looked at it might just be worth moving out to save yourself the stress alone. A number of people find that the stress of renovation doesn't come from the actual work itself, it is
from the feeling of living in a state of chaos for a number of months.

Another important factor to consider is financial security, do you have enough money to be able to move out of your house while you renovate? There are a number of costs associated that would normally have to pay for once, but you will be need in both places for the time of the renovation. This can include things such as rent, utilities, transport between the two places, plus essentials that you will need at both houses - food, water, toilet paper, coffee etc.


In the end it is a personal decision of whether you can afford the cost of temporary accommodation, or whether the stress of living in chaos for the duration of the renovation is worth it to save the money. Personally I'm glad we were unable to live in our place when we renovated, as I don't think I could deal with not having all my creature comforts of home!