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!

The best tool in the biz

We SHOULD have bought this stud finder on our first day of renovating, turns out we didn't actually buy it until we had put a number of unnecessary holes in both the walls and ceiling of our house. It is definitely a must for renovators, especially if you are putting your own down lights in. 

Stanley Stud Finder

It basically helps you find the wood studs behind your drywall, so that you know where you can and can't secure things and put holes. For example it would have came in handy when making holes for the down lights, as you can't put holes through studs, this would have made our life a lot easier and we wouldn't have had so much patching to do!

You place the tool against the wall and it will give you a visual and/or audio notification such as a beep when a stud is located. Which makes it super easy to find a stud and then nail or screw to it if necessary. We used it find the studs in the wall so we knew where to nail skirting boards too.

We bought this the Stanley Stud Sensor, Model #STHT77404 - only $29.95 from Bunnings Warehouse.

Helpful Resources

1. Collins Complete DIY Manual

This book was our Bible for all things renovating.
It was easy to read and had in-depth knowledge on nearly every subject from design, repairs to electricity and plumbing.







2. Bunnings

Our go to place for tools, products and advice was Bunnings. They had a good selection of DIY brochures that helped us plan what we needed to do. The staff are generally pretty helpful about products but be wary about taking all advice.
They do have some good how-to videos on their website though,






3. YouTube

Youtube is full of videos for renovation novices.
Their how-to videos were really helpful for us. Some of the ones we looked at were: How to pave, How to install tap ware, How to lay floorboards.

How to Paint

I know it sounds basic, but had absolutely no idea where to begin with painting or how to paint a room when we first started. We went into Bunnings for a free workshop which gave us painting tips and it was very helpful, highly recommend it! We ended up being the only 2 people in the class so we basically got a tailored course on painting specific to our own house.

What you will need:

• Electric Sander ( I recommend the Ryobi brand)
• Sugar Syrup
• Foam Mop
• Mop Bucket
• Small angled edging brush (for cutting in)
• Rollers - good quality otherwise small brush hairs will be left on the wall
• Roller trays
• Mixing stick

Paint:

Depending on which area of the house you are going to paint will depend what type is needed. We did the whole house and needed the following different types of paints.

• Good quality Primer (For all walls and Ceiling)
• Flat Ceiling Paint (Ceiling)
• Top Coat (All walls)
• Semi-Gloss Paint (Architraves and Doorframes)
• Kitchen & Bathroom Paint (Mould resistant paint for any wet areas)

Steps to follow:

1. Sanding! The most ridiculously boring and tedious job you will have to do is preparing the walls before painting. Our walls had dents and bumps everywhere so took a significant amount of time to sand before painting was even thought about. I recommend getting the Ryobi Electric Sander, around $80, but it is so worth it! You will generally need to wait until the dust settles before moving onto Step 2, as it can get really messy if you try and start moving on with dust in the air. Make sure you sand both the walls and architraves.
2. Wash the walls with Sugar Syrup, this will help clean the walls of dust and grime before painting. A foam mop will be suitable for this job. Wait for this to dry before moving to Step 3.
3. Cutting in - You will then need to 'cut in' the ceiling, using the primer and the angle brush. Cutting in involves going around the outside edges of the ceiling with the smaller brush as the roller won't reach right up against the walls. 
4. Using a good quality paint roller, paint the ceiling with primer first, after cutting in start from the light in the room and move outwards.
5. Once the primer is dry, repeat steps 3 and 4 with ceiling paint
6. Repeat steps 3 & 4 with primer on the walls & prime the architraves also
7. Once the wall primer is dry cut in and roller with your wall colour paint. 
8. Apply second coat of wall paint to walls
9. Using semi-gloss or full-gloss paint the architraves with a small angle brush.