15 renovation mistakes you can make

I recently found an article on the 15 biggest renovation mistakes that people can make, which gives some handy hints to new home-buyers looking to invest in a property, and are considering renovation as a way to create profit on their new home. I hadn’t read this article before we bought our house, but I know the whole thought process in what was right and wrong, and how we were willing to spend was very confusing. So hopefully this article will help someone else in their house hunting considerations.

Renovation wasn’t our main focus when we were looking at buying, ideally we wanted to buy a house we could just live in comfortably. However when looking, we found the prices for houses that met our criteria were way more than we were willing to pay, as we were very set on the amount we felt comfortable repaying fortnightly back in a loan. Therefore we started to look to houses we could renovate, and ideally end up with a house that was similar to others we were looking at for a more reasonable price. I know that there would be a lot of other people out there with this same dilemma in this current financial climate, and this article will help others consider some very important points such as suburb selection, researching your property, and considering offers before buying. Although we did not read this article before buying, we didn’t rush into buying a house. We spent a lot of time researching to understand our means; in how much we were willing to spend, our criteria for a house, and then more time researching suburbs, selling prices, and weighing the pros and cons to houses we are looking at and their immediate areas.

Another very interesting point I would like to discuss from the article is confusing fiction with reality. Renovation TV shows houses being renovated quickly, but they have trades and bundles of money handed to them. Realistically renovating is dirty and hard, but what no one tells you is how long things can take, and how much things can cost! In reality you have a limited budget, trades are astronomically expensive so you end up doing as much as you can DIY, and DIY takes a lot of time! So consider these points discussed in the article carefully before you look at buying, and especially renovating!