A Simple Guide To Quickly Become A DIY Home Renovator: 9 Steps

By Dutch Norwegian CoupleRenovation

Have you ever wanted to do a home renovation yourself? Just one room, or go big and do a whole house? We jumped into it with little to no renovation skills and this is our best tips if you want to do the same. Because you totally can!  We’ll tell you the things we’ve learned. How to get started. And how to survive.

Step # 1 Plan, Plan and plan

The most important thing to do before you do anything else is to make a plan. A good plan. Either you’re doing one room, or a whole house, the importance of a plan is just the same. You need to estimate time, make sure you know what tools you need, what materials you need, what things will cost and what should be the first step second step and so on. Do you need an electrician? A plumber? The hours of the people you need to hire in will be one of your biggest expenses. Are you handy? That will help keep your costs down. (and we’d actually not recommend you to take on a renovation if you’re not). 

Before you start you should get quotes from multiple contractors on every step of the project where you need to hire in people. You need to do a lot of research to find out approximately what paint, wood, floor, lamps, toilet etc will cost you, depending on which room you’re renovating.

Step # 2 Make a budget and (try to) stick to it

You might think: Why should I make a budget if you’re already now suggesting that I might not be able to stick to it? Well, there are many reasons why. First of all, without a budget you’ll have absolutely no idea what this renovation will cost you. Second of all, you’ll not be able to take smart economical choices without a budget. 

After you’ve gotten quotes from different companies for the jobs that you need to hire in help for, you need to choose the cheapest and/or best quote for every job, and add this in your budget. 

And once you’ve researched enough to know what you’ll ned to pay for all the materials you need, you must put this into the budget as well. 

We’ll tell you this from our own experience, MOST of the time you’ll end up spending more money that what you estimated. For some reason most people seem to underestimate when it comes to renovation costs. And usually there will be costs that you didn’t even think about, and therefore isn’t in your budget at all.

That’s why we recommend you to always put a buffer in your budget. Because you must expect to go over budget. And you should also mentally (and economically) prepare yourself for the fact that you’ll go over budget. Maybe even over your budget and over your buffer! But if you follow this advice, the chance that you’ll be too disappointed and surprised is smaller.

But you might also be able to end up within your budget. That really just depends on how good you were to estimate the costs. We just want to point out that the chance that you go over budget is there, and you need to be prepared for that before you start a renovation.

Step # 3 Buy a house – Learn what to look for

You need to purchase a home. If you’re renovating to sell, you need to find a home with potential that’s cheap, but still isn’t too crappy. So that you’ll make money in the end. In the beginning it can be difficult to know what to look for, or how much work and costs are required. But you’ll quickly learn this after your first project. Look for a home that you think you can renovate at a as low cost as possible. And with as little work as possible. But still there need to be some work. Because if not, you’ll not improve anything and therefore not add any value to the house or make any money.

If you want to renovate your own house and you plan to continue living there, that’s a whole other story. Then the house is like it is, and you need to work with what you have. You might (probably will) find surprises during a renovation either way. 

Try to think about and plan for everything. The only thing we can say is that you’ll learn and gain experience, so that you’ll know better what to look for.

Step # 4 Google EVERYTHING

Haha, we just had to include this one! In this first learning-by-doing home renovation, google has been our best friend/teacher/guidebook. We (mostly I) google almost everything to read and learn how to do it. And to get videos showing us exactly what to do. Of course we also ask around for guidance. And our local hardware store gives us a lot of advice on how we should do many of the things that we’ve done in our house. We really appreciate all the help, guidance and advice that we’ve gotten. And therefore we recommend you to do the same. Ask around to learn. Do you know someone in the construction business? Or someone that have done renovations on their own? This will really come in handy, and you should definitely ask them for help.

Step # 5 Set working schedules/ hours

One thing we’ve learned when it comes to doing home renovations is that you should always, always set working hours. You’ll be so excited to get going and make progress, that without one you’ll work crazy hours. And you’ll get really exhausted. Work hard, but keep the hours on a normal level to not burn out. 

In our case, we talk about full time home renovations where you do this instead of a normal job. After weeks and weeks of working every single day on our house. All day from early morning till late evenings. We found out that this way will not work in the long run. You should make a schedule, and for us that means working 9-5 and having every weekend off. You need to have balance in life to not burn out. 

If you do a part time renovation it’s just as important to set a working schedule. Do you have a day time job? Then we recommend you to plan to work on your renovation not more than 2-3 evenings a week. And possibly some hours in the weekend. Of course this depends on how big your renovation is. For a shorter period of time, you can manage to work on your renovation every evening and every weekend. But if you’re working on a bigger renovation, you should make sure that you get enough rest in between the time-consuming renovation.

Step # 6 Finish one project at the time

It can be really tempting to start on other projects before the first one is 100% completed. Especially if you get stuck. Or you’re missing parts. Or you don’t know how to go further. You can easily loose motivation and want to start on something else. But we recommend you to stick to your first project until it’s finished. If not, you quickly end up having many unfinished projects. And feeling like this renovation is never going to give you the results you want. Have you ever felt like this? Finishing one project at the time will give you a great feeling of success, and motivate you to continue.

Once that’s said, sometimes you also have to except that it’s good enough. Are you a perfectionist like me? That can give you great results. But not every single thing needs to be perfect. Or at least not on our crazy perfectionist level of perfect! I know we can use so much time to make every single detail great. At some point you just have to stop. And get on with something else. You’ll have enough to do- we promise you this! 

Step # 7 Listen to experienced people

Are you just like we were? Is learning by doing your thing too? Then you’ll need to listen to experienced people. Ask, ask and ask again! Get the information in writing just to be sure. Next thing you know, you’ve forgotten what was said and will need to ask again. We speak from experience. If you’re doing things yourself in a renovation, you must be hundred percent sure you’re doing it correct. We quickly learned the importance of this, and you should too. Sooner than later. That’ll save you so much time. Making mistakes and having to do it all over again is no fun! Unfortunately, this will happen to all of us.

Step # 8 Things take time

When planning, and once you’ve started, you’ll wonder where all the time goes. Wooshhhh and the day is gone. In the beginning we always though that things would take so little time. But in reality, it took us ages. When doing things yourself, you’ll use time on every step. So just get used to planning at least the double amount of time than what you first think you’ll use. Then it might be realistic. Let’s face it – TTT.

Step # 9 Don’t work too hard

Listen to your heart! Or at least listen to your body. Do you easily get thrown away? Like we’ve mentioned, it’s easy to work too much when starting on a home renovation. Do you have an evening ritual? You’ll have so many plans and thoughts in your head when doing a home renovation that sleeping can at times be difficult. Both falling asleep and during the night. I had times where I was thinking so much on the renovation that it took me forever to fall asleep. And in addition to that, I also kept waking up in the middle of the night. And couldn’t fall asleep again because my brain started to spin on ideas and plans the second my eyes opened. My best tip in this case is to make lists with what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. For me this works because then I have all the plans on paper and I get calmer in my planning-brain. The other thing that will help, is having an evening ritual. You should try to relax before you go to bed. I’ve been trying out drinking tea in the evenings as well, before going to bed. And that’s been helpful. If you go to bed at the same time every day is also helps.

We hope these tips will come in handy, if you’re thinking about doing a home renovation yourself. If you follow them, we know you’ll get a great home renovation! Do you have any more questions? Feel free to email us, we always answer you!

Please share this post you guys! That would make us jump for joy! Until next time.