Prioritizing your renovation will lead to a successful project. Just thinking about starting a renovation project can be a stressful event, and for good reason. Your life will feel like it is upside down while your renovation is in progress. The key to having a positive experience is to prioritize the key elements of what your overall vision is. This process will help you survive your renovation and come away feeling very satisfied and will inevitably lead to a successful project. Prioritizing your “wish list” will also give yourself and your contractor a clear understanding of where your budget needs to be, and more often than not when you have a clear budget, you will get a clear picture of what is feasible and where you might have to compromise.
When preparing to start your renovation it is very important to ask yourself the question “what can I not live without”. This will be your most prioritized renovation need, you can then start to really categorize your needs, wants and wish list. This will start to really carve out a clear vision of what is most important to you and your family. This realization will give you some relief from stress, and anxiety right from the get go. Having this conversation with your contractor during your first meeting will also help to alleviate any communication breakdown throughout the process of planning. A clear vision is paramount to success, and how can you have a clear vision without knowing what is most important?
After completing hundreds of renovation projects over the years, everything from bathroom to complete rebuild and custom additions, I have learned to put a lot of emphasis on priority scaling. Once you have made your wish list, step back and start to really focus in on the scale of priority. I like to use a simple 1,2,3.
- The first is the key elements you can not live without I like to call these “needs”.
- The second most important items I like to label as “wants”.
- Often these feel like needs but they really become the “wish list”.
For example, in my own home renovation my wife really wanted a bigger walk in closet, for all of us who are married we know this now becomes a “need” for the success of the project. The wants really become the secondary, often convenient aspects of the project; we had to move the wall to enlarge the closet so repainting the other rooms made sense and became a “want”. After all the dust settled I was able to incorporate my media center/ built in cabinet for the living room, this “wish list” item really had no bearing on our day to day function (even though I really wanted it) but because we prioritized I was able to squeeze it in the budget. Had I started there and found out I couldn’t afford the rest of the list we would not have had a successful renovation.
I can’t stress the importance of this enough, prioritizing is the most important step in your renovation followed by planning. Execution is a distance third, most contractors can execute but very few are good at helping their clients prioritize productively. To help you achieve your dream please contact us for a free Custom Home or Renovation planning guide to help you with the process.