Keeping your renovation on track can be an art form, here’s one lesson I learned to help – Know when to say no . . . .

Hi, I’m Luke Hanson. Welcome back to the series Seven Renovation Lessons Learned by a Financial Adviser. This week we’re looking at lesson number six Know when to say no.

Renovation projects can have a, a bit of a tendency to run out of control if you let them. Things that start off as a good idea, and you kind of explore go, well, what if we did this or what if we did that or added things onto each other, can soon blow the budget out, but can soon also blow out the time expectancy of how long you think everything is going to go for. And you can kind of, particularly if it’s your own property, you can go, Oh yes I definitely want to do things a little bit better than I originally planned or budgeted for.

Or this is another idea that’s come across along the way and you don’t want it to get too far out of control. So the lesson is to know when to say no.

Things don’t always go to plan so you also need to know when to say no to things that might be a good idea and might be the right choice, but you actually don’t have the budget for, because you may have factored in a little bit of contingency, but you don’t have a full contingency to change everything dramatically. Even though if you’re starting off from scratch, you may have chosen that, or you may have waited to get a little bit extra money.

The truth is that you’re in the midst of a renovation now, you can’t stop halfway through and say, Oh, well, I’ll wait another three months until I save the money. You’ve just got to learn to say no sometimes. So trying to make the best of a situation rather than trying to make everything perfect.

In the words of one of my favourite fictional characters, Michael Scott: Adapt react, readapt, apt.

And that’s a really silly little way of saying that sometimes you just need to take stock of things as you go along the way. And yeah, nothing always goes to plan.

You need to be proactive and reactive and making sure that as much as you can have a game plan, you’re never going to be able to rigidly stick to it. So make sure that things are evolving along the way, but they’re not getting out of control with the way you involve them. Evolve them rather.

Keep the end game in mind. This is really important when you’re learning to know to say no. As lesson number one, we said we were going to put that game plan together, making sure that we had, we understood what the purpose of the renovation was.

As the renovation goes on, it can be easy to lose sight of what that end goal is, what the purpose is, but let me encourage you. One of the lessons needs to be that you need to keep the end in mind and, yeah, don’t, don’t get too carried away with everything along the way. I know sometimes renovations and properties is a very personal thing. Particularly if it’s your own property you’re living in you want to kind of add all the 1% and 5% along the way and get a better outcome, but you don’t want it to snowball out of control.

You don’t want one trade to take an extra day just to get things, you know, exactly perfect or add a few extra things on. And then it delays something else. And all of a sudden your flooring guy was meant to come in tomorrow and you have to delay him and he can’t come back until next week. And so you have a week of downtime just to get that little extra thing done that wasn’t actually necessary in the first place.

So lesson number six is Know when to say no.