Buying a house – and making a home from it – is an extremely personal endeavor. Your own feelings about space and location are vital in your decision-making and impossible to ignore, even when other factors might take more precedence. Buying a home is also one of the most expensive things you will do in your life, making it all the more important that you get what you can right.

Doing a good job with renovation is not just about meeting your own expectations but also improving the value of your investment. In a market set to cool, you will need all the help you can get to retain your property’s medium-term value. For older properties with ‘character,’ how can you do this without removing the soul of your home?

What Do You Love About It?

Firstly, you need to identify precisely what it is you love about your home. What makes it the unique and special home it is, and what long-standing features serve to define it? Your answers can be as specific or broad as you like. 

You might like the beamed roof in the living room or the rafters in your loft space. You might like the original brass fittings that have been there since the early 20th century or the pantry that has remained a focal point of your kitchen. Stone floors, old fireplaces, quaint floorboards; all of these things contribute to the charm of a house well lived-in.

What Needs Repairing?

As well as considering the elements that make your home the home it is, you should also list, separately, the things that definitely need addressing during your renovations. These things would be potential repairs or refurbishments to correct issues, prevent future problems, and otherwise eliminate risk.

For one, you might have gouges or cracks in the plasterwork in some of your rooms, necessitating a re-plastering job and a fresh lick of paint. On a more fundamental level, you might seek to address your home’s heat inefficiency by identifying and closing up any potential cracks that invite draughts.

Adding New Elements

These lists are essential in helping you devise your step-by-step plan for a characterful renovation. You have identified the parts of your house you love and likely those that define your home’s character. You have also earmarked key areas for improvement, like maybe a more modern kitchen. The missing pieces are the new elements you might intend to add. Treat the parts of the home you love as subtractive elements; any potential renovations that would negatively impact characterful elements of your home should be removed from the renovation list.

More practically speaking, you might align upcoming refurbishments with the style and décor of existing fixtures. Brass light fixtures might invite dusky green paintwork, while stone kitchen flooring might invite rustic kitchen units. In renovating, you get to be utterly creative.

Author: Samantha Waites