5 Things to Expect When Starting a Home Reno

When embarking on a home renovation project, there are countless unknowns that can’t be anticipated. But if you are planning to live in the house while you renovate, or if you are living in temporary accommodations, the small issues seem to feel compounded, the delays more discouraging when it means more time spent in an uncomfortable living situation.

In the early days living in our house, there were times when I questioned whether we had gone into the project too overconfident. The money we were saving by living there during the reno allowed me to quit my job and work on the house full-time, but it also meant living off of just one income—and with much of our savings gobbled up by the down payment, it meant that every remaining dollar needed to be carefully accounted for.

With no room in the budget for hired help, the only choice was to continue with the work on our own (and on weekdays by myself) and get it to a livable state as quickly as possible. So in those first months, any moment that wasn’t spent on working felt like it was wasteful, keeping us from our goals. This leads me to my first point:

1. Expect to Feel Guilt for Downtime

When your home is a dusty demo site—especially if you are living there during the process—there is almost is no such thing as downtime. When you are in the thick of it, every day is spent working, and weekends are prime productivity windows.

In the midst of our first floor reno, the work never seemed to stop. Even in the evenings, production would continue when Malcolm got home, as we needed to initiate all the projects that required two sets of hands and minds. We would go over plans for the following day, design details and execution methods. Most nights we would go to the hardware store to get supplies, as we only had one car that Mal needed for work, meaning that any additional supplies I needed during the day had to be retrieved on foot or via an Uber. Late at night, I would stay up and work on design elements: the kitchen layout, lighting options, product sourcing, overthinking every detail.

And on top of all of the additional work that a reno brings, there are the everyday things that still need to get done: cleaning the spaces you do have intact, food preparation, laundry, personal hygiene (if it doesn’t inevitably take a nosedive). Every hour seems to be accounted for, and anything resembling downtime might be better labelled ‘sleep’.

2. Expect Things to Fall by the Wayside

The truth is that certain aspects of your former life are going to start to slip as you take on large-scale renovation projects. Renos have a way of being all-consuming, commanding your time, your undivided attention, and often, control over your bank account. It is important to go in to a project with realistic expectations of what it might cost you to achieve.

Do you have an active social life? Love to make your meals from scratch? Go running? Have an epic beauty routine that makes you feel like a million bucks? (jealous). Unless you are some sort of wonder kid, it’s unlikely you will be able to do it all without sacrificing something—because, of course, we are only human, there are only so many hours in a day, and other rationalizations that happen to be true.

My advice would be to make a list of your priorities; the things that you are absolutely not willing to let slide and then carve out a daily or weekly timeslot for those things. For us, it was important that we still ate relatively healthy, and we allowed ourselves time for grocery shopping, meal prep and cleanup, while also trying to keep meals as simple as possible. And although our social life probably did experience a bit of a slump, we made sure to still make time for friends and family as much as possible, usually going out at least every other weekend and still attending events like engagement parties, baby showers, weddings, etc.

Looking back, there actually weren’t too many things in my life that I felt were being compromised by the renovation. I was fully prepared to go ‘all in’ in those first six months especially, and this hustle became a way of life for a while, partly because we had a pretty daunting to-do list, but also because we were living in the house while we worked on it, so anything we could do to expedite the process meant getting closer to having a home to relax in.

3. Expect a Mess

If you are taking on a project like this, and especially if you are planning to live there while you do, I cannot stress the importance of creating a space in the house where you can get away from the chaos. While we tried to create a bit of a reprieve from our demo mess, I don’t know how successful it was. The kitchen, where our reno began, had old bifold doors that allowed us to close it off in an attempt to control the dust. There was a space in the living/dining room where we had our couch, a television, and a small kitchenette with a mini-fridge, but there was no hiding from the dust. Despite our best intentions, dust coated everything and our temporary living/dining set-up felt rough and anxiety-inducing. With no viable kitchen other than our makeshift kitchenette, we would collect our used cups and dishes in a big tupperware bin, which we carted up the stairs and washed in the bathtub once it had sufficiently piled up. Everything felt harder than it should have been, and the constant state of our surroundings did wear us down after a while.

My best advice is to be as organized as you can with the spaces you do have control over. Develop ‘stations’ for meal prep, dish storage, tool storage, etc., and keep sleeping, eating and sitting spaces as far away as you can from the work zones. If you can’t have access to a room with a door, 6mil polyethylene sheeting works well for controlling dust (and it can be reused later as a vapor barrier, if this is something you plan to do). We used this to contain dust from later projects and I wish we had thought to do this early on because I feel like it would have made a difference.

It is important to be adaptable. As our renovation areas moved throughout the house, so too did our temporary living spaces. When the kitchen became functional and our living/dining room became the focus of the work, we moved our sitting/eating room to the upstairs guest room. That same room later became our temporary sleeping accommodations while I renovated our primary bedroom.

4. Expect to Flounder

Luckily, the early days when the house was in its worst possible state were also the days that I felt the most motivated. The labor-intensive, self-directed work felt like a welcome change compared to my previous job and the some of personal stresses I had encountered earlier that year.

What I liked most about it was that it was a different kind of work. It was exercise, it was repetition, and while there were lots of design choices and problem solving, a good 90% of the work seemed to be mindless. Demo cupboards, scrape wallpaper, patch walls, drywall, mud, tape, sand, paint. Repeat. Over and over. I never listened to so much music in my life. I listened to audio books. And for the most part, I was content.

That said, sometimes I would get stuck.

There were days when things felt like they were standing still, when problems seemed insurmountable and when little progress was made. I remember this being the case for the upstairs bathroom—the smallest space in the house that provoked the most amount of frustration as I took on the role of plumbing the new bathtub drain and shower fixtures. Spoiler Alert: I did get it working, but it required an embarrassing amount of trips to the hardware store.

There have been things that I’ve needed to redo. I refinished floors in the upstairs hallway twice, re-sanding, re-staining and varnishing them because I wasn’t happy with the way they turned out. And I’m still not thrilled with how they look. I repatched flooring that I had initially installed that was chipped and had gaps. I repainted entire rooms when the color didn’t look like the swatch, and when we finally had room in the budget to have our windows replaced, I redid the window trim and all the filling and painting that went with it.

5. Expect the Unexpected

Because home renos can’t exist within a vacuum, external factors are bound to creep in and complicate our best laid plans. In the short time we have lived in the house, we have had roof leaks, pipes freeze and burst, mice in the basement, and squirrels coming in through holes in window screens and running amok in bedrooms (I have videos I will share). We can’t foresee these complications, so it is best to be adaptable. We can laugh off the small stuff, and remind ourselves why we began the reno in the first place: because we wanted to create something, put our personal touches on a part of our world that we encounter each day, and maybe save some money in the process by doing it ourselves.