How to Make Home Renovation Less Stressful

How to Make Home Renovation Less Stressful

Wooden ladder beside painting materials

If you have ever renovated your home, you know how disrupting it can be. Even a simple home upgrade can bring chaos into your home life and disturb your everyday life. Moreover, planning and pulling off something as complicated as a home renovation project can be stressful. First, there are usually some added expenses you didn’t expect, and then there are delays you can’t control and the contractors that come and go. When you count all these little things up and add the fact that you can’t freely walk around your house or relax due to the ongoing work, it can feel truly overwhelming. If you’re going through this, don’t worry, there are specific ways to make home renovation less stressful! Let’s get into them.

Set a Clear Budget

Money is frequently the primary source of stress and anxiety before and during a home renovation. For starters, determining how much money you’ll need for a makeover is hard enough, and then there are always the added costs you didn’t see coming. At that point, keeping all the additions within your budget becomes the real problem.

To set a clear budget and make home renovation less stressful for you and your family, you need to consult the experts from the start. Talk to your contractors about all the expenses you’ll need to take care of and the final budget you won’t go over. Finally, make sure you and the contractors both understand the vision for the project and what needs to be done to turn your house into your dream home

Create a Precise Timeline

Person holding a pencil

Another critical thing to take care of during the planning process is to set a clear timeline with your contractors. Decide on a final deadline, but also specify end-dates for each milestone. While almost all remodeling projects experience a few hiccups along the road and a slight delay or two for various reasons, having a timetable with essential checkpoints listed can assure you that your project is on track. Finally, your project manager should notify you if a deadline needs to be extended and explain how this will affect the overall schedule.

Rushing the job is a lousy way to get everything done on time. Instead, it’s much better to go slower, measure everything twice and go over schedule but end up with your dream home than to end up with a hastily renovated home full of minor errors.

Expect a Mess

Shallow focus photo of furniture with bubble wrap showing how to make home renovation less stressful

There has never been and will never be a perfectly organized, dust-free house remodeling. Even though you and your contractor should try to keep the debris inside the restoration area, don’t be shocked if everything becomes dusty. Cutting and sanding drywall and wood is a fundamental component of every restoration and is an extremely dusty process. Even if you’re only painting the walls, there will still be a mess to clean afterward. So, cover all you can, and until the project is over, learn to put up with the chaos. Constant cleaning will only make you go crazy since there will always be a new mess until the project is complete.

Get Out of the Way

It’s simple to let something take over your life when all you want is to get it over with. However, you’ll burn out if you spend all your free time on the renovation project. So, plan some time away from your home to ease your stress. Plan a weekend getaway or a field trip with your family to recharge your batteries. Being at home all the time only serves as a reminder of everything you still have to do.

Furthermore, when dealing with a high-scale renovation project, sometimes it’s best to relocate until it’s finished. This is because you won’t be able to go about your day as you would usually due to the disruptions from the renovation. For example, if you’re doing a bathroom and kitchen remodel, moving out until those parts of your home are finished might be the best option for you and your family. Otherwise, you might feel like you’re going camping inside your (now extremely messy) home. 

Pick Your Battles

Man unwrapping scotch tape to do a home renovation project

It’s easy to concentrate on all the intricate details of your home renovation when you’re trying to design your dream home. You want it to be perfect, and that’s completely understandable. However, it shouldn’t feel like the world will end if, at some point, you realize you didn’t choose a suitable color scheme for your kitchen. If you didn’t know, one of the most significant contributors to remodeling stress is obsessing over every little thing.

Some things you can’t control, and that’s okay. The key is to pick your battles, choose what’s most important to you and fight for it while you let other small things go. For example, maybe you don’t care about the shade of your wall as long as the cupboards are the exact shade of mint green you picked out. Decide what’s the most important thing and what you can compromise on.

DIY What You Can

When it comes to DIY projects, it’s critical to understand your boundaries. They can be fantastic opportunities to develop new skills, bond with family, or exercise your artistic side, but they can also be perilous, hazardous, and unsettling. When determining whether to DIY or pay a professional, consider the three Ts: time, tools, and talent. The DIY way may be considerably more expensive, complicated, or risky than you’d want if you lack skills.

In Conclusion

Renovations are always stressful. No matter how hard you try, there’s nothing you can do to avoid all stress that comes with it. However, you can make home renovation less stressful by taking some precautionary steps. For example, by being open with your contractors and creating a detailed plan, you can avoid going over budget and missing all the deadlines for your renovation project.