7 cost-saving tips for renos on a tight budget
Renovating on a budget can be easier than you imagine with these seven cost-saving tips to keep your finances on track.
Renovating on a budget can be easier than you imagine with these seven cost-saving tips to keep your finances on track.
Ready to make some changes to your home, but on a tight budget? In Australia, the rising cost of renovations due to material and labour shortages has many homeowners feeling the pinch.
However, don’t despair, there are plenty of cost-saving renovation tips and tricks you can use to transform your home. With a little extra effort, clever planning, and a little common sense, these seven tips can help lower renovation costs, save some cash, and even put a little coin back in your pocket.
Your dream renovation might include an entirely new floor plan, but the cost of a structural renovation can make a considerable dent in more than just your walls.
One of the best cost-saving tips for renovating on a tight budget is to work within the footprint of your current home.
This means using the current location of all your plumbing and electrical wiring items, and not moving any of these items to a different part of the room. By keeping them in the same place, you’ll avoid the time, labour costs and raw materials you’ll need to move them, as well as the cost of potentially having to bring in an engineer or architect.
One of the most sustainable and cost-saving ways to save money on your renovation is to use second-hand materials such as recycled timber, windows or bricks at a significantly lower price.
Start by looking on local online marketplaces, head to local not-for-profit recycling and reuse stores, and let others know you’re in the market for materials: word of mouth can be a powerful way to source materials like a second-hand kitchen.
It’s also worth hitting the discount shelf at your local hardware store. Often new materials that simply have cosmetic scratches, or tins of paint blended in the incorrect colours by mistake, are available at a reduced price.
The neatest trick, however, is to sell your own old building materials or appliances you’re disposing of during your renovation, saving on rubbish removal costs, and putting every dollar back into your renovation.
Whether it’s a quote for a professional job, the cost of a new appliance, or sourcing a bulk order of raw material, it’s worth doing your research and comparing prices to ensure you can get the best deal.
By calling different businesses for a quote, or even comparing online, you can find big differences in price. It’s also worth considering what time of year you’ll need to purchase certain items: for example, appliances may be cheaper during end of financial year sales from retail outlets. Subscribe to newsletters of appliance retailers to take advantage of last-minute sales or end-of-stock runoffs.
Also check with your trades to see if they have a preferred supplier, and if you’re able to take advantage of their trade discount.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to fittings, fixtures and appliances, especially in the kitchen and bathroom. One of the best cost-saving tips is to work out where in your renovation budget cheaper materials and appliances can be used, without necessarily sacrificing quality.
This could include opting for laminate floors rather than laying timber, installing a flat pack kitchen rather than ordering a custom one, or visiting a factory outlet for appliances such as ovens or fridges.
Thrifty renovators can easily make a big difference to the look and feel of their home by focusing on the little things.
In the kitchen, for example, this can include swapping out tired knobs for new stylish door handles on cabinets, replacing a kitchen benchtop, or simply putting in a new splashback.
Likewise, in the bathroom, you could replace the shower head or taps to change the aesthetic.
A fresh coat of paint can make a big difference to the look, feel and aesthetic in your home. In the living areas or bedroom, this can be as simple as adding a feature wall or giving the timber trims a touch up.
Areas such as the bathroom can be one of the costliest rooms to renovate, but using tile paint to go over dated burgundy and pink tiles from the early 1980s can give a room a fresh lease on life.
Budget renovations can be tricky to manage, but it’s important not to skimp on paying the professionals when it counts. It might be easy to knock through a wall, but if it’s a load-bearing one, it could be a costly mistake.
Whether it’s a licensed builder or a structural engineer, tradies have the requisite experience to not only get the job done properly, but also explain why parts of a job need to happen a certain way, and the costs involved.
Eager to find out more about renovating on a budget, or trying to find the tradie that’s the right fit for the job? hipages can help. Just post your job on the hipages app, and up to three tradies will be in contact to kickstart your new renovation.
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