Legal Issues

On top of unknown repair issues, you may end up having problems with back taxes being owed on the property or unpaid liens. Once the property is yours, you are also responsible for payment of these issues. You do want to have a careful title search done on the home, but sometimes that doesn’t uncover all the issues with foreclosures. If you aren’t buying the house at auction, and through a pre-foreclosure sale instead, you may even be responsible for evicting the tenants who reside there. Foreclosures are a good area for investing right now, but you have to have some idea what you are doing and have significant cash, in the form of loans, to help restore the property to its marketable self.

Budgetary Constraints

Who wouldn’t want his home to look more beautiful and be more comfortable? The desire to live in a better home than your neighbor’s or your friend’s home is part of human nature but you have to check your bank balance before you plan out any home renovation ideas. The first stage of your planning should therefore, be the allocation of a budget for this purpose. You have to decide as to how much money you can spare for home renovation and also make up your mind regarding the type and extent of renovation that you wish to carry out. You would then need to get quotes for the work and see if the budget allocated by you would suffice for the purpose. You should also keep a suitable margin for unexpected contingencies. You might need to reduce the extent of repairs or compromise on the quality of work in order that the expenses remain within your budgetary limits.

Design Consultants And Contractors

If the home renovation work is of a minor nature, you can plan it out and execute it yourself as any warehouse can supply the required materials and the do-it-yourself instructions. However, if the home renovation involves major overhaul of your home, it would be advisable to take the help of professional design consultants and to assign the execution work to a contractor. Nowadays, the best place to look for such professionals is the Internet as you can contact them easily from the comfort of your home and get their opinions and quotes in no time at all.
Moreover, you can either engage a general contractor who would supervise the entire work on a turnkey basis or you can go in for individual specialized contractors for different types of work such as flooring, roofing, plumbing and painting. The general contractor would take responsibility for the complete scope of the home renovation work from designing to execution and even clearing the debris when the work is over.

Spectrum Of Home Renovation Work

The range of home renovation work is vast as it includes many aspects such as floor improvement, wall makeover, roof replacement, maintenance or improvement of ventilation, heating and air conditioning systems, providing water proofing for basements, providing energy saving devices for reducing utility bills, providing improved safety measures, and decorating the home and its exteriors.

Careful planning and implementation will go a long way in achieving the type of home renovation that you need.

1) Noise Pollution: Any home renovation work will necessarily involve noise pollution from the various equipments that are being used along with the noise of vehicles bringing in materials. Children and old people are particularly affected as they cannot sleep during the day. The solution to this problem is to inform your neighbors well in advance about the schedule of work and assure them that all possible measures will be taken to reduce the noise pollution.

2) Continuous traffic: When home renovation work is going on, many trucks will be coming in and going out of your area and some of them might be parked on your street leading to traffic congestion and creating safety concerns for the children of the area. The solution is to earmark certain areas for parking and asking the contractors to work only during certain specified times and not on weekends. Moreover the contractors should be warned that they would be responsible for any damage to your neighbors or their properties.

3) Dirt and dust: Any home renovation work will necessarily create a lot of dirt, dust and debris that can easily pile up on your neighbor’s property because of the wind. Whereas very little can be done to counter this problem, the contractor can be asked to maintain as much cleanliness as possible, especially near the premises of your neighbors.

4) Nuisance factor: Home renovation in any form can be quite a nuisance for neighbors, especially the heavy trucks that can damage their property and the unseemly sights of lots of piled building materials for a long time. The solution is to protect the work area suitably so that the children of the area do not play inside the work area. As a goodwill gesture you can provide your neighbors with free car wash coupons and offer to get their windows washed.

5) Foul language: It’s often seen that workers at any home renovation site use foul language most of the time. The solution is to warn the contractor that such inappropriate language would not be tolerated.
The best thing that you can do after the home renovation work is over and the debris cleaned up, is to throw a lavish party for your neighbors in order to thank them for tolerating the inconvenience caused to them.

Useful Hints For Finding Reliable Contractors

1) You should talk to your relatives, friends and your neighbors who might have dealt with contractors recently. Word of mouth recommendations are mostly reliable.

2) You can get useful leads from the owner of a local hardware store as he will not recommend any unreliable contractor. In fact he maybe eyeing your business for supply of materials for your home renovation project.

3) It would be a good idea to entrust your home renovation work to any of the big box retailers such as Lowes and Home Depot as they offer contractor services for any type of home renovation. They have sub-contractors on their panel who carry out the work on their behalf. Obviously, all these sub-contractors are very reliable as they are properly licensed and have appropriate insurance. In any case, the big box retailer will be responsible for the proper execution of the work and he would not like to have dissatisfied customers that would give him a bad name. However, this system will turn out to be a bit more expensive as both the retailer and the contractor will have a share in the pie. Reliability does come at a price!

4) Another good source of finding a reliable contractor for home renovation is your bank manager because he must be dealing with home renovation funding all the time and he would be aware of the reliable and unreliable contractors.

5) Before finalizing the contractor you should try to get at least three quotes and compare them. You’ll find a lot of variation in these quotes and it will be necessary for you to study these quotes and then decide who will be the best contractor for your home renovation.

6) You should also make sure that the contractor that you choose should have a proper and valid license and liability insurance, damage and workmen’s compensation coverage.

Choosing the right contractor for home renovation is very important as your most prized possession is at stake. You should, therefore, check on references by making pertinent inquiries. Moreover, you should choose a person with whom you will feel comfortable as he will be in and out of your home all the time. It’s also important that you are able to communicate with this person effectively and with ease.

1) You need to get certain approvals from government departments before you can take up the home renovation work. You should not get frustrated at the delays that might take place in getting the approvals as these things take their own time. You should be prepared for such delays.

2) You should be able to express your taste and choice of various designs, objects and elements along with the color schemes that you like to the architect, so that he can incorporate the same in his proposal to you. It’ll be easier and quicker for him as well as for you to give your approval. A useful suggestion to compile your own choices is to develop a scrapbook in which you can keep on incorporating various objects and designs that you might see in various magazines that conform to your taste.

3) Monitoring of the cost of home renovation at every stage of work is very important. Taking any decision of the choice of any item, however small, without considering the cost aspect can have disastrous consequences as even small things can add up to a lot in the long run. It’s advisable to keep a spreadsheet in which you can keep on comparing the actual expenses at any stage with the budgeted expenses. If you find any variation, you can always find the reason and take corrective measures at the right time.

4) Cost saving should be your motto without, however, sacrificing on quality. An illustrative example is that you can buy readymade shelves instead of the costly made to order shelves and then ask the contractor to make proper allowance in the walls to accommodate these shelves.

5) You can do the work of home renovation either through the services of a general contractor or by hiring different contractors for each type of work such as plumbing, flooring, roofing, painting or electrical work. It will be ideal if you can hire a local contractor as he would be familiar with the place and would be of great help.

6) When you make your budget for home renovation work, you should always keep some margin for unforeseen expenses that are bound to crop up as work progresses.

If you properly plan out things and fix a suitable budget in tune with what you want to achieve, you will find that the home renovation work will proceed with very few hitches.

Proper Planning Can Avoid Runaway Costs

A simple example will illustrate the point. A part of your home renovation project might be the replacement of a window. You would naturally have found out the cost of a window and included it in your budget along with the labor cost for replacing it. However, when the actual work takes place, you might find that in order to fix the standard size window that you have bought, you’ll need to make a large number of alterations to the exterior siding since the earlier window was of a non-standard size. Moreover, you would need to replace and paint the exterior and interior trims. The cascading effect of this would go further as the newly painted trim would not match with the balance trim in the room. So you would need to paint them as well. You can well imagine how the cost will escalate with all this extra work. So, what started with merely replacing a window could go on to become a renovation job that make expenses touch the roof.

The solution to this problem would probably have been to anticipate the extra charge and go in for a custom made window that would have eliminated the need for changing the opening or painting the trims. There is no doubt that the non standard size window would have cost more but that could have been incorporated in the budget of home renovation.

Another solution to such wayward cost trends is to estimate the impact of the project on other areas of the home where home renovation is not being planned. You might not have anticipated that some of your renovation work might necessitate alterations to the structure, which might be a costly affair, especially when the structural changes also entail making changes to the plumbing, wiring and ductwork.

Don’t Be Led By Wayward Desires

You might be tempted to plan and execute home renovation work as per your idiosyncrasies without thinking about the future impact of your decision. You can certainly do what you want, like constructing a swimming pool in the backyard of your home. Apart from being expensive to clean and maintain, a swimming pool is not what home buyers are looking for. As such, the money that you would be spending on the swimming pool would not enhance the value of your property one bit. Moreover, over expanding on your home normally does not enable you to recover the full extent of your investment.
Look before you leap is the advice to anyone going in for home renovation.

Abide By Municipal Rules

The stipulations governing the parameters of the distances, sizes, heights and other items vary from one municipality to another. Whereas some of the approved measurements are based on safety and structural considerations, others are merely arbitrary. In spite of that, you should make sure that you become aware of the same and abide by the stipulations before undertaking your home renovation work.

Certain types of home renovation work such as electrical or plumbing work in a wall necessitate that the work is inspected before you can cover it with drywall. You can get the permit for such work only if you you’ve had the inspections done at the desired stages.

Get The Permits In your Name

You should also be careful regarding getting the permits in your name and not in the name of the building contractor. This is essential as you can be left high and dry in case the permit is in the name of the contractor and you decide to fire him mid-way or if he decides to leave or if he cannot complete the home renovation work. You would then have to go through the routine once more and spend extra money.

You should not be led astray by people telling you that you can do the home renovation work without bothering about the permits. You must check up with the relevant municipality yourself and abide by their city codes to avoid problems in future. If you don’t follow the rules and carry out the changes without the necessary permits, you will face problems if you wish to sell the property. You will then have to bring the work to the standards of the city code and get the permits. This could prove to be a costly mistake.

You must remember that normally permits are always needed for home renovation and as such it would be advisable to contact the building department of your local city municipality and find out which permits would be required and the procedure to be followed for getting these permits. You should also take the permits in your name and ensure that necessary inspections are done as and when necessary. As they say, a stitch in time can save nine.

Encourage Use Of Environment Friendly Materials For Home Renovation

If you are not aware of where to get environment friendly material, you can go online and find out about those companies that provide green materials or products made from green materials. Even your local construction supply store will be able to give information regarding such companies. Basically, these products should not be chemically treated and their harvest or production should be in an environment friendly manner. Green products use paints that do not have volatile organic compounds and insulation that is made from recycled items such as bamboo, cork or cotton.
One of the most common and widely used materials for home renovation is wood and care needs to be taken to minimize tree-felling. You should only use products made from wood that are certified to be safe for usage by Forest Stewardship counsel. Kitchen counters and other household items should preferably be made with recycled goods like paper, plastics and some special types of wood. Besides being environment friendly, green materials need less maintenance than other construction materials and last longer.

It’s not easy to find eco-friendly material for home renovation and as such you’ll need to do thorough research either on the Internet or by inquiring through the merchants and building materials supply companies. This search might test your patience but the outcome will certainly please you.

Other Avenues Of Making Your Home Environment Friendly

Besides using green materials you can consider the use of other methods for creating an environment friendly atmosphere. Your home renovation can include skylights that help sunlight to pervade your room rather than using electrical energy which is again a big drain on resources. Incorporating solar panels in your roof can provide free energy for various purposes in en eco-friendly manner besides cutting down on your power bills.

In view of the damaging effects that global warming is producing in our lives, it is essential that we turn to green materials for our construction and home renovation needs. We should also use natural insulation and energy-efficient wood for replacing our existing windows. Recycled glass can be used for flooring and dual-paned glass for windows in order to make your house more environment-friendly.

Sources Of Home Improvement Loans

Loans for home renovation can be obtained from private lenders, building societies or from banks. However, if you are only carrying out a home improvement work or some urgent plumbing or electrical repairs, you can take a personal loan which should be repaid within a short time so that you do not have to pay much interest. Personal loans do not need any security or collateral and as such the applicable interest rate is higher.

Secured Loans For Home Renovation

Home improvement loans are normally secured and as such you have to offer your home or any other property as collateral. Lenders feel more secure with such loans as they know that they can repossess the property if you falter in your repayment of the loan. As such, they offer lower interest rates and flexible payment terms so that you can stretch the repayment period thereby reducing the amount of the monthly payment. In any case, before taking any type of loan, especially a secured one, you should go through the terms and conditions of the loan with a fine toothcomb. After all, you don’t want to lose your most prized possession – your home.

Terms Of Home Improvement loans

Loans for home renovation attract different interest rates and other terms depending on the credit standing of the borrower. If your credit rating is good, the lender will offer a lower rate of interest and better terms as he does not see much risk in lending the money and vice versa. Lenders also take into account the values of the property before and after the renovation work. The other factors that a lender considers are the extent of the improvements, age of the house and the existing mortgage. It’s advisable to take loans for home renovation from government approved lending companies including loan associations, banks and mortgage companies as there is less likelihood of fraud.

Benefits Of Home Improvement Loans

The biggest benefit associated with taking a loan for home renovation is that you can get tax deduction for upgrading your home. Moreover, when you renovate your home, its value will go up as its quality improves. This will mean that the loan will pay for itself. Home renovation can also be funded through an extra advance on mortgage, a flat rate unsecured loan or a variable rate unsecured loan.

Will The Investment Yield Any Returns?

Before deciding in favor of home renovation, you should consider whether the investment that you’ll make in home renovation will bring suitable financial returns. You should try to find out the status of your home in relation to the other homes in your neighborhood. Your investment will not add much market value to your home if it is already of the same size as others but if it is smaller than others, any addition to your home will immediately increase the market value and your investment will bring good returns. This factor should be taken into consideration when you choose between buying a new home or renovation of your present home.

Budgetary Considerations

When you are in the mood for upgrading your home either by going in for a new one or for home renovation of your existing one, you do have a budget in your mind that you can conveniently set aside for this purpose. This would be needed to bridge the gap between the sale proceeds of your home and the cost of the new home if you decide on shifting to a new home. In case you choose home renovation, this amount of money will be used for upgrading your home in several ways.
Architectural Considerations
You can consult an architect for the home renovation estimates and then decide the extent of work that would be feasible with the financial resources at hand. Moreover, if you are inclined towards home renovation rather than buying a new home, you should be prepared for losing the outdoor space if you are adding additional floor space and you would have to bolster the footings if you are planning to add an extra floor to your home. These architectural considerations should be discussed with an architect before you take any action.

Inconvenience Factor

If you plan to go in for home renovation, you should be prepared for a lot of inconvenience when the actual work of renovation takes place in your home. All the furniture and other belongings might have to be stacked in a room or a corner to make way for the workmen who will be swarming all over the place. You should have the patience to withstand all these inconveniences which will bother you more in the kitchen and the washroom areas.
You are the best judge of your needs but you should weigh the pros and cons before making a decision.