Step-by-step on how to maximize your renovation budget

1. Getting all your money together to figure out how much you want to spend on renovation:
   
   
   

   Renovation cost is not cheap. It can cost anywhere from 30,000 – infinitely if you are talking about total home renovation. Many first-time homeowners are young couples with less savings. Without which, they would need to finance by borrowing from parents, friends or more commonly, renovation loans from local banks.

   Thus, having a precise estimation of total expenses is very important to plan for future payment if the main part of your budget is from borrowing. Even if you are paying cash out from your pocket, you don’t want to be in the situation where you spend all your hard-earn money without anything left for upcoming vacation.

2. Getting renovation quote from direct interior design companies or renovation portal:
   
   
   

   There are two ways to get quote:

   Walking-in to interior design firms: this is the traditional way and preferred method of many customers since face-to-face discussion is more reliable and allows more time to go into details for different expenses. However, this way is also time-consuming and less productive since you are just at the planning stage, you want to gather as much quotes as possible.

   The second method, getting renovation quote is one of the easiest, simplest, and time-saving method to grasp the information needed for your renovation plan. Some portals are so user friendly and process enquiries in seconds that you can just get 10-12 quotes from experienced interior design firms without having to walk down to their offices.

3. Doing research, inquiring your friends about their recent renovation experiences.
   
   
   

   After having a rough costing sheet for budgeting process, it is the time when you need to get out there and learn experiences by reading reviews from online blogs, from social media platforms, from friends and relatives who have done renovation previously. This helps to identify common mistakes, overlook areas that should be paid more attention on during the execution stage. Also, by reading reviews, homeowners can narrow down the most suitable firm in term of design styles, reliability, reputation, cost and the final product.

4. Setting priorities, cutting down all unnecessary items that do not need an upgrade.
   
   
   

   When it comes to renovation and upgrading houses, it always seems like everything needed to be changed. But face the reality, you only have a certain amount of money to spend, would you prefer to buy a latest sound system while the old one is just as good or to upgrade the 10-years old washing machine with excessive consumption of electricity?

   Setting priorities also mean that you want to spend more money on item that are long-term usage and less on those that are just temporary, come and go with trend. The rule of thumbs is the higher the priority, the higher the quality, the higher the cost. The lower the priority, low-cost alternatives are preferred but average quality. One should never buy cheap, low quality furniture. If you can’t find a better alternative, just skip the item and save for next time.