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.

2. Break these projects up into two categories - essential and non-essential
3. Use the spreadsheet template and break up the projects into tabs in the spreadsheet
4. Go shopping!! Well... don't spend your money just yet, window shopping is required to know how much the products you will be using will cost.
5. Fill in the estimate column on the spreadsheet, don't forget to get quotes for labour and always over estimate rather than under estimate the cost.

Once you have this estimate amount you can decide if you are going to include all the project in both your essential and non-essential lists or cull some from the non-essential depending on the amount remaining.

As you go through the renovation process, use the right hand column of actual amounts to keep track of  how much everything has cost. It adds up quickly! And it's good to see at the end of the renovating a breakdown of the costs in case you decide you want to do it again!

Budget Spreadsheet Template