Spreading the costs of home improvements

Spreading the costs of home improvements

When you move into a new home, or you’ve lived somewhere for a while you might begin to spot things you want to change. From a quick lick of paint to more drastic redecorating jobs, changing the look of where you live can be a rewarding, but often expensive, undertaking.

Logbook Loans provider Auto Advance share their tips for spreading the cost when it comes to your home improvements.

Scaling your home improvements

One way to help manage how much you spend on your home improvements is to work out exactly what needs doing and put all those jobs into a list.

You can use this list to work out the scale of your home improvements. Is it a few large jobs or lots of smaller tasks?

From there you can begin working out what each job costs and how important they are. For example if you have issues with your central heating you might want to prioritise getting that work done before the weather turns colder.

Having the potential cost and the priority of each home improvement is useful for working out how much you can afford to do and invaluable for working out your budget for home improvements.

Budgeting options

Once you know what your budget is you need to decide on a means of generating it. This could be diverting some funds each month into a specific bank account to help pay for tools, materials and professional help (if necessary). With larger jobs such as refitting a kitchen or bathroom this can be the best way of saving up to pay for those jobs to be completed.

Smaller tasks it might be possible to incorporate into an existing budget by cutting back in other areas. For example the cost of repainting the living room when you’ve factored in materials might roughly equate to a night out that month.

Remember also to consider if you need to have construction insurance or not for your improvements!

Cutting back briefly in one area to take another job off the list can be worth it in the long run.

DIY or someone else?

The biggest influence on a home improvement budget is deciding between doing the job yourself and getting someone else to do it for you. This can be an extra cost you might not want but sometimes you need to consider the alternatives.

Any DIY job you undertake you should be confident in your ability to complete. Deciding not to pay for professional help can actually cost more in the long run if you have to pay a professional to undo a mistake, then complete the work you wanted done.

Someone else might not necessarily mean you have to spend a fortune, friends or family members who are good at DIY or work as professional tradesmen might be able to help for a lower rate or provide advice.

Depending on how many jobs you need professional help to complete can help to decide on how you spread out the tasks that need to be carried out. If you have lots of jobs needing a professional it might mean you spread them out over a longer period of time to allow you to save and build up the budget to cover the cost of the work.

Don’t forget to shop around and get quotes too, this can help you to save money on any work you have carried out and may help you to find a group of reliable tradesmen who you can call on for other jobs as they arise.

Working out a budget based on the scale and priority of the home improvements you want to make can help you to make the changes you want to make in your property without losing control of the cost.

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