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The Big Picture Budget

May 18, 2020 by barxonomy Leave a Comment

Your ‘Big Picture’ budget – excerpt from The Renovation Guide

Have you ever watched a home renovation TV show, like Grand Designs or Love It or Leave It, and seen the section where they ask the homeowners: ‘what’s your budget?’ and wondered…how did they come up with that number? Or how does the presenter immediately know that’s really low or just right?

Budgets are complicated and they can be intimidating.  We’ll get into the details of making sure you have a realistic, easy to manage budget plan, a little later on. For now, you need a rough figure to make sure you can afford what you want to do, and to be able to confidently answer that question when asked by a designer, architect, or tv show host. 

There are so many variables into how much your renovation will cost, that is impossible to give a definitive answer. So our approach is to follow these steps:

Getting your number

1. Get a rough idea of the baseline for the renovation you want to do

2. Adjust for location and quality of finish – a high end finish to a Central London home will cost more than a budget spec in a rural area.

3. Speak to architects and builders or use some online quote forms, and get some refinements of your number.

4. Realistically evaluate your finances, and make your final big picture number at least 20% lower than what you can afford. You will need wiggle room for the unexpected!

5. Remember this is just the starting point – as you do more research, you can adjust and reallocate funds. You can’t know everything there is to know yet – you just need a figure that lets you play the game. 

6. Remember VAT – often building work and supplies will be quoted excluding VAT, so you want to make sure you have room for the extra 20% on those often large-ticket items.

Helpful Resources

For detailed suggestions of tools you can use to get a rough budget, or access to our budget calculator, you can sign up for our online course, The Renovation Guide – free for a limited time!

Notes

Other things you can do is talk to architects, or use our builder consultation, or companies like RESI, which will walk you through a quick process to get an estimate of the work.

One often forgotten factor to consider in your budget is whether you will be living onsite or moving out. Your project will potentially move faster because the builders don’t lose time setting up and putting away their equipment every day, but you’ll have the cost of rental accommodation and factors like travel depending on your situation.

This should help you start coming up with a large scale budget – once you have the plans and an idea of the design, you can get into the details and we’ll cover that in a few sessions.

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Architecture, Building, and Construction Jargon

May 14, 2020 by barxonomy Leave a Comment

The ABC’s of things you probably don’t understand!

Unless you work in the industry, there are going to be a lot of words and phrases that you’ve never heard or thought about what they mean. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of these, and it’s included as part of our online course, The Renovation Guide (currently free for a limited time).

Here are a few of our favourites from the list:

Batter (Walls): No, not cake batter, sadly. In architecture, batter means an inward inclination or slope of a wall or structure. Some architects choose this design to provide structural strength while others choose it for decorative purposes.

Box Crib: Think of this as the final steps of a game of Jenga, but without the anxiety of a collapse. Instead, box cribs are temporary elements used to reinforce and add additional support to heavy objects during construction.The material used to create box cribs are often wooden bars. Due to their practicality, box crib forms are also used in film productions for stabilising platforms and dolly tracks

Muck: Slang term used for sand and cement mortar.

Nogging: Small strips of wood that provide extra support between two joists.

Rubber duck: slang for a wheeled excavator (as opposed to a tracked excavator)


If you have a favourite term you’ve come across, we’d love to hear it!

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