Whether you have recently bought a house or feel like it no longer fits how you live your life, refurbishment can seem like the perfect way to bring life into it.
The best option for your home, whether you plan to live in it for a very long time or have ideas of selling in the near future, is working with professionals on a bespoke refurbishment project that helps to provide your home with a major refresh.
It is strongly advised to work with professionals for any significant refurbishment work, as they will have the technical skills and architectural understanding to ensure that your home feels modern whilst maintaining its historic character, especially when that is a legal requirement.
There is a temptation to go it alone, but here are some of the most common mistakes that prove why it is not always a good idea.
Why Do You Need Planning Permission?
Refurbishment does not start with a drill, but instead starts by understanding your home and what you should or even legally can do with it.
Whilst most common refurbishment tasks would rather neatly fall under permitted development, you should look into whether your home has restrictions on what you can do with it.
If it is listed, any works you do must keep with the historic protected character of the building, whilst some areas are subject to conservation orders (often known as an article 4 direction).
Other houses still have restrictive covenants which restrict alterations from being made.
The first place to ask is your local planning authority, but working with professional renovators will give you peace of mind as they know what to check and what to ask.
Why Must Form Follow Function With Renovations?
Looking for bespoke renovations is about ensuring that your home meets your needs and the needs of anyone living in your home. This means that whilst a gorgeous-looking room is important, it has to be more than an art installation.
Whilst most important in rooms defined by their function, such as kitchens and bathrooms, if you design a living room with a “showhome mentality”, you end up with a place that looks great once completed but is either unpleasant to live in or quickly builds up clutter and mess.
As part of the consultation process, refurbishers may ask you about what you love and hate about your existing room and what you would want most in anything new.
Why Must You Go In With A Plan, Budget And Timescale?
As anyone who has seen a property renovation show can attest, most of the biggest mistakes that come from people aiming to refurbish or redecorate are that they go into the project without doing all of the planning necessary to make sure it will run smoothly.
You should have a complete idea of how you want your room to look before a single bit of work is done or a single inch of wall is painted. Major changes can lead to scope creep that can cause both budgets and timescales to spiral out of control.
As well as this, make sure your budget has space in it for delays, increases in material costs or unexpected expenses. Professionals will factor this into any project plan they develop for you.
