5 Ways to Save on Home Renovations
Posted on | January 17, 2010 | 1 Comment
Paul and I are in the middle of our first renovation project together: the laundry room. I know what you may be thinking…”who is going to see the laundry room?”, but for whatever reason, this project makes me so happy. Besides, the laundry room sits right off of our kitchen, and we keep the sliding door open all of the time because the litter box is in there.
Here are a few ways that we have figured out to save money on this project, and hopefully they will help to save you money on your next renovation:
- Borrow from Other People: Currently we have my co-worker’s two handheld sanders and steamer to remove wall paper, and will be borrowing our neighbor’s shop vac. One day I am sure we will own all of these tools, but for right now it is great to be able to borrow them. Also, Autozone has a tool loan program where you can borrow a tool for a certain amount of time with no cost to you. What a great concept! You will need to leave a deposit for the tool.
- Purchase Quality Reusables, and Take Care of Them: We repainted three of the rooms in our home, and still have two rollers, leftover painter’s tape and a sand block. These items are reusable for future projects (such as this one), and so spending a few extra dollars to buy more quality items from the first project has already saved us money. I wish we had had the foresight to purchase a better pan for our paint rollers because we have had to purchase a new one all ready.
- Plan Ahead: A little planning goes a long way in not having to redo things. For example, our laundry room is going to be repainted, we are putting in a new basin sink to replace the original one, we are refinishing the pine wooden cabinet, and we are spackling/painting and putting in new shelving in the closet. The order we need to do all this in order to be most efficient and not ruin any painting is to refinish the wooden cabinet first (very messy, sandy job), then take out the old sink, add a few tiles to the floor below it to match the existing tiles, then paint the closet and walls, then lacquer the wooden cabinet (this is after painting so that if we get any painting on the wooden cabinet, we can just sand it back off), and then put in the shelving unit.
- Moving Coupons: If you go to a post office and pick up an address change package, there is a 10% discount coupon to Lowe’s. Home Depot accepts this coupon as a competitor.
- Use Reward Gift Cards: In order to pay for the majority of this project, I cashed in 10,000 reward points on my credit card for $100 in Lowe’s gift cards, as well as have $200 in visa gift cards for switching our internet and cable service to AT&T Uverse from Comcast. What a deal! We were dying to change from Comcast anyway, and now we have the channels that we want at the same price we were paying before (plus $200 in visa gift cards).
Wish us luck! I will show you photos of the before and after when it is all finished (yay!).
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I have Joined the Yakezie Challenge!
January 18th, 2010 @ 10:07 am
great ideas! Scott and I know all about home renovations and love finding ways to save also. we’ve been pretty lucky with using craigslist to find some things – like a pedestal sink for our powder room (20 bucks!), a sliding glass door for our dining room (100 bucks!) and some really old solid wood doors (free!) that were in a place that was being gutted and renovated. It definitely takes patience to find things that will work for your project, but if you plan far enough ahead sometimes you can find great deals.
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