LESSONS LEARNED FROM DIY RENOVATIONS
My husband and I have DIYed all the renovations we’ve done in our house. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
• BUDGET YOUR TIME.
When considering the cost of a DIY renovation, budget in your time as much as your money. When we renovated our kitchen, the single task of repainting our cabinets instead of replacing them took 250 man hours. To put that into perspective, it would have been three weeks if we’d both worked on it full time. But we both worked other full-time jobs, so it was more like three months.
• WORK AS A TEAM.
In our family, I have the design mind, and my husband has the engineering mind (literally—he’s an engineer). He lets me make the design decisions, and I in turn follow his directions when it comes to the actual construction. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and let the person with the expertise take the lead.
• DON’T BE AFRAID TO LEARN.
We’ve learned everything from laying tiles to replacing fans, stripping cabinets, installing sinks and countertops, and even doing electrical work. And we didn’t know any of that before we started. Make friends with YouTube and home blogs (see page 122 for a slew of great social media DIYers to follow). You’ll make mistakes along the way, but simply approaching the project with a willingness to learn is the important step.