The A to K of Melbourne Home Renovations

The A to K of Melbourne Home Renovations covers the best ways to ensure your Melbourne home renovation runs smoothly, delivering a home that you love to live in. It looks at engaging interior designers, choosing finishes and finding the right builder to deliver your home renovation.

Aesthetics – Planning any home renovation is a balance between functional and aesthetic needs. Finding the right look for your kitchen, bathroom or home renovation is a crucial step in making sure you get the renovation you’re looking for. Spending time researching magazines, websites and articles about house renovations will help you establish your own personal style and what works best for your home.

Bathroom – The same can be said for bathrooms. You can download a free ebook 101 Kitchen and Bathroom Design Ideas at http://themakeovergroup.com.au/bathroom-designs-renovations/

You should also check that if you’re having bathroom work done that your bathroom renovation is being undertaken by a registered building practitioner who’s registered to do the work.

Costs - Try to work through ll you selections before your hit the go button. This will save costly changes throughout the project. To develop your cost estimates, try our Online Renovation Costs Calculator 

Design schedule – When working with Melbourne home renovation clients, we always work to zero in on the clients design needs. That is, we get to understand their style and then create a design schedule that allows them to understand exactly what they’ll get.

A design schedule is a little like a story board of all the different finishes, colours and fittings to be used in your house renovation. If you don’t have one, it makes it difficult to ensure you’ll get the result you want. It usually costs $1,000 - $2,000 in design time, but its well worth it.

Ego – Let it shine! You’re modernising your home for yourself, so make it work for you. So many Melbourne home renovations fall short of their full potential because the client wasn’t allowed to dream about their ideal home. In particular, kitchen and bathroom renovations need to reflect your tastes and preferences. Not only are they the most functional rooms of your home, they’re also the heart and soul.

Furnishings – if you’re modernising your home, how will your existing furniture look? Do you want to design you home to fit with the current furniture or do you want to update your furnishings as well?

Great communications – Being able to communicate with the people involved in your home renovation is probably the single most important factor in making your house renovation a success. Make sure you find a person with expertise in both design and building so you only then have to deal with one person who manages the whole process for you. This will save you hours of heartache and potentially thousands of dollars by avoiding mistakes.

Home Builder – Protect yourself. Make sure your builder is a registered building practitioner. By law, Melbourne home renovations exceeding $5,000 must be undertaken by a registered building practitioner who is qualified to undertake the works. The best way to establish this is to ask the builder for their builder’s registration card. You can then verify their registration further by visiting www.building commission.com.au

Insurance – Most building contractors have public liability insurance, however only registered building practitioners can offer home warranty insurance which is required, by law, for Melbourne home renovations exceeding $12,000.

Most importantly, home warranty insurance covers you for anything that goes wrong in the future with work undertaken at your home.

Joint effort – A successful house renovation really needs the support of all parties involved. When looking to pair up with your designer/builder, think about how they’ll deal with issues or problems when things go wrong. Will they be pro-active? Will they look to resolve the issue without getting into the blame game? Do they have a professional approach?

Things inevitably go wrong with home renovations, it’s just the nature of these kinds of projects. The important thing is how you all deal with the situation when surprises pop up.

Kitchen – As I mentioned above, the kitchen is often the heart and soul of your home. Engaging a kitchen designer to help you plan not only how your kitchen works but how it looks is a smart way to get the kitchen renovation you’re looking for.

Richard Armstrong is a Director of Melbourne firm The Makeover Group. He possesses over a decade of Melbourne home renovation experience plus post graduate property qualifications. Educated in interior design, he has undertaken hundreds of home renovations (Melbourne), covering design and build phases. A registered building practitioner, he contributes to Australia’s leading property publications and websites.