Remodeling is fraught with all kinds of pitfalls, even if you’ve done it before and have a good idea of how it works. Each room is different, and remodeling the bathroom in your current house might present an entirely different set of challenges than when you had it done at your last house. There are a lot of different things that you should do and be aware of when you embark on a remodeling project. There are also certain things that you should never do, if you want your project to go as smoothly as possible. Let’s go over three of the things in that latter category below.
Never Do It Yourself!
We know this is a hard one for a lot of homeowners to follow. It can be tempting to try and remodel your kitchen or bathroom by yourself, as a kind of pet project to keep you occupied over the next few weeks or months. The thing is, though, remodeling even a single room can be a massive job. It involves a lot of different moving parts, including possibly altering your plumbing system and electrical wiring to fit the new configuration. Those are not systems that anyone but a trained professional should be messing around with. Please, for your own safety and sanity, leave the remodeling to a contractor you trust.
Never Go Into A Remodeling Project Without a Budget
Unless you’re independently, fabulously wealthy, you should always calculate a budget before you so much as call a single contractor to talk about your remodeling ideas. Anyone worth their salt is going to want to know what level of funding they have to work with on the project, so they can make sure that they don’t go overbudget. If you go into a project like this without a budget already established, you’re risking spending way more money and time on it than you were initially intending to. No one likes those kinds of unpleasant surprises.
Never Leave Yourself with No Room to Move on Your Budget
Yes, we know that we just said you should establish a budget to prevent people from going over it. Here’s the thing, though: projects like this very often do tend to go over the initial budget. Not just because contractors didn’t estimate the length of the job properly, either. Plenty of homeowners change their minds about certain aspects of the remodel halfway through, or decide that they want more than they originally envisioned. That’s all well and good, but if you don’t have any wiggle room in your budget you risk being left with an incomplete room when you run out of money. Don’t do that to yourself. You shouldn’t spend more than you can afford, but you should give yourself just a bit more room than you think you need in case it’s warranted.