How to Blast Through Home Renovations

*This is a guest post 

Oh, the mess! Why is it that even decorating just one room seems to involve messing up the entire house? While it’s not practical to try and do home improvements without some temporary upheaval, there are a few strategies to make the job go smoother and quicker.

Know What You Want

Unless you know exactly what you want before you start, spend some time putting together your thoughts and figuring out how you want your finished space to work.

An idea or mood board can help. Create one digitally on the computer or make a physical board with actual samples such as paint colours or wallpapers, photos for inspiration or examples of textures and fibres.

However, you plan, be flexible, and willing to compromise. If you let your ideas get too fixed, it can lead to frustration and disappointment when you visit a DIY shop or hardware store trying to find the exact things that match your ideas. It can help to start with a style, such as rustic or modern, city loft or country cottage for example.

When it’s time to buy materials, take a moment to measure up properly. It’s so frustrating when you find you’re one roll of wallpaper short.

Have a Plan

Whether it’s a big job or a small one, have a working plan.

Floor plans, even quick and rough sketches of a room layout can help prevent daft mistakes like putting a TV on the opposite side of the room to the plug sockets or your cable/satellite connection.

Planning includes figuring out the practical logistics of how to arrange the rest of the house so you can work on the room undergoing alteration.

If you need to clear a room of furniture, self-storage can be a godsend for making space and protecting expensive items from paint spatters or other damage. Rental periods are short so it’s worth investigating. Storage units are also great places to store decorating and building materials, from ladders and pasting tables to drills and saws.

Another thing to plan for is the calendar. Choose a time when you’ve got a block of free days so you can crack on. If you’re having extensive renovations done and need to move out for a while, maybe the work could coincide with a local holiday, swapping contact numbers of course in case you’re needed? Give yourself plenty of time to organise storage for furnishings or anything else you need to move to clear space, as well as allowing for delivery delays on materials or supplies. The bigger the job, the longer the lead time you’ll need to get organised.

As work progresses, keeping a running task list also helps, especially for longer-running jobs where you might run out of steam halfway through. Ticking things off a list can be very satisfying and keep you motivated to carry on.

Scout out the Bargains

The planning phase is also a great time for sales hunting. There are some very good deals around at the moment so well worth snapping up a bargain when you see it, even if it’s something you plan to use for a future project.

Instead of cluttering up the house with future-use items, pop them in your self-storage room so they’re ready when you are.

Efficient Work Methods

When it comes to doing the work, a common mistake is to move all the furniture up to one end of the room, then move it all again when you need to work on the other side. It wastes time and risks accidental damage to your furniture if not yourself if you’re creating obstacle courses where you’re trying to work.

If you don’t have a spare room where you can store boxes of ornaments or some furniture, this is another way a self-storage room can work. At the same time as you retrieve stored tools and materials, take along the items you need to clear out and give yourself a clean slate to work on.

Home improvements and renovations are rewarding projects, whether you relish the work or approach it with dread. Once the job’s done, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of pleasure and satisfaction you get.

Getting organised with plans, materials and basic storage gets you from graft to gratification that bit quicker.