It’s time to start mapping out the timeline of your renovation as we continue part 4 of the series . . . . Hi, Luke Hanson, Financial Adviser and Director at My Financial Design.
We’re continuing the series 7 Renovation Lessons Learned by Financial Adviser. Today we’re looking at lesson number four, Set the schedule. You want to make sure you have a schedule set for the renovation period, kind of upfront.
Now we know things don’t always go to plan, but if you’ve got a schedule, you can see well if something doesn’t go to plan, what else is it going to affect other than going. Well, it didn’t go to plan.
Let’s just throw everything up in the air and hope for the best. You want to make sure that you’re identifying, if something goes wrong, what the schedule is so you can get onto those next trades and say, Hey, we’ve had a week delay here, what are you placed for, you know, coming back in a week’s time later, instead of, you know, in two days time or something, have that schedule planned out.
For me, it was simply having a notebook and putting a page for each day and having a bit of a plan that way. But you want to make sure you have an estimation of how long the entire process is going to go for, right from the start, and then trying to identify which trades are going to come in on which days and put that together.
It’s so good to prioritise what’s important to you as far as the renovation goes as well. By that, I mean, if you’ve got a bit of a schedule, sometimes things have to be done first and things have to be done last, and that’s just the order of renovations. But if you’ve got the luxury of kind of having an option of how things get prioritised, you may think to yourself. Well, for me, the kitchen is the most important part of the renovation. I want to make sure that definitely gets done because if surprises come up or things, don’t go to plan, or I run out of money, I want to make sure that I’ve got the important things done first.
Now that’s like I said, can be a luxury sometimes because, you know, for example, you might want to do the painting last or the floor coverings last or whatever the best trade sequence is for what you’re doing as part of your renovation. But if you can think about what’s important to me in this renovation, get that done first while I’ve got the money. And then if things don’t go to plan, well, we can kind of keep the other stuff as it is, perhaps. But you want to make sure you don’t have the prize kitchen at the very end.
And all of a sudden things have gone wrong or things have gone over budget, or we’ve made some decisions to adjust the lighting and upgrade the power points when we never had that in the original plan, because the electrician was there on the first day and the kitchen isn’t done until the end. So have the idea of setting the schedule upfront, having a bit of an overall play as to who’s going to come in on what days, what the overall renovation is going to look like. And if you have the luxury, do the things at the start that you value the most, you’re going to get the most bang for your buck for, cause you don’t want to miss out on that because your budget’s gone over or things have gone wrong.
But yeah, set the schedule. It’s a great lesson I’ve learned and I’m sure it’s going to apply to you too.