How to Keep Your Home Renovation Under Budget

Renovating your home can be exciting, since there are so many ways to make your vision come to life and so many contractors and designers to work with. Unfortunately, renovating can also be incredibly stressful—and one of the most challenging aspects is staying within your budget. Whether it’s an unexpected electrical cost, costs that rise because the job needs to be finished quickly, or an expensive lighting fixture you just can’t live without, your budget can be exhausted fast. So, how can you avoid these common renovation mistakes? We polled contractors and designers for tips and tricks to contain the costs from start to finish.
   

Begin Your Project with a Realistic Budget

People often come up with an arbitrary budget number they believe makes sense for their project, says Chip Wade, a host and designer for HGTV and DIY Network and owner of WadeWorks Creative. That number, however, is usually inaccurate.

“Where a lot of us go wrong is, even if we have a general scope of the project, we want what we want,” Wade says. “And we want our budget to buy what we want, but that’s just not reality.”

Uzi Ovadia, president and owner of Oz General Contracting in Bellmore, agrees. “People sometimes think they’re smarter than the contractor, and that’s not necessarily the case,” he says. He has seen renovators buy materials themselves and then bring in a cheap contractor to finish the job, which never seems to cut costs.

On the other hand, many homeowners sign on with contractors too early, before they’ve brought in a designer or made a finite plan. “You actually have no idea of the scope that captures the overall essence of your design,” Wade says. “And that’s because you’re not designing first. You’re just doing a rough scope pricing, which is very dangerous.”

And oftentimes, people wind up busting their budgets because they can’t stick to a plan, says Ann Marie Little, who runs Little John Remodeling Inc. in Northport. “They get their numbers, and then they change the plan as they go or add things on the fly, and they don’t think things through. Sometimes it’s because they’re not waiting for the right person. They’ll take whomever is available and make their decisions hastily.”
    

Work with a Renovating Pro

One of the most important steps for a renovator is to create a full design plan before they call a contractor, and before assigning their project a budget. The best way to do this is to bring in a designer who can map out all of the materials, fixtures, and the scope of work to scale so there’s no ambiguity.