Practically and Personally: Ensuring You Deal With the Pressures of Home Renovation
The rush of excitement that comes when you’ve bought a house is incomparable. It is like Year Zero from when you’ve made the change from renting or living with parents or parents-in-law, but the typical family unit never progresses linearly. In recent years, there’s been a lot more families who have had to move to their parents or downgrade. This makes those new starts seem even more amazing.
While it’s a massive task to get onto the property ladder, what happens when you’ve got it and now you need to start upgrading the home? There’s a huge amount of practicalities, emotions, stress, and of course, the necessity of looking after the kids during all of this. So let’s show you what it takes to get through it properly.
Dealing with the Practicalities
First of all, to make sure that you are able to deal with renovating your entire home, you’ve got to address the practical side. There are so many different things to consider here, and while everybody is different, here’s some things that you should bear in mind:
Define Your Goals
Understanding what you’re trying to achieve will help you make more informed decisions throughout the entire process. For example, are you hoping to upgrade the entire house? If you are, this is when you’ve got to start thinking about potentially temporary living arrangements, such as staying with family or finding a short-term rental.
Or, if you plan on upgrading one part of the house at a time, how feasible is it to live there while this is going on? This may mean you’ll have to put items into storage. While there’s plenty of storage providers like Pink Storage that can help with short and long-term storage solutions, you will need to make sure the approach goes smoothly.
Set a Timeline
One of the most important things to do is to ensure that you can stick to a schedule based on your family and individual commitments. Lots of people try to do as much of the renovation work themselves for obvious reasons, but while there can be great intention, it can result in delays.
Doing work during the evenings can be very overwhelming and exhausting because of how much needs to be done, but also the lack of skill we can all display when it comes to doing something as seemingly straightforward as putting up wallpaper. There’s a lot of guides online. One of the best DIY guides on YouTube is Home RenoVision DIY, which covers a lot of ground.
Don’t Forget Your Budget
The most important part of renovation work is to ensure that you are being realistic. This includes factoring in your desired improvements and any unexpected expenses. If you need to do major construction or renovation work, it’s best to hire reliable contractors. You can always look for online recommendations, but it’s critical to bear in mind that the price you are quoted is not set in stone.
You need to have a buffer, and ideally, this would be at least 20% more than what you’ve been quoted. Invariably, building projects can run on longer than anticipated due to things that we can’t comprehend, and while we can stress out about the fact that it’s going on for a lot longer than normal, it’s far better for peace of mind to ensure that you can over budget.
Dealing with Child Care
A home upgrade is something most people do before they have kids. So many of us don’t have that luxury in the modern day, and therefore upgrading our home means having to work around a lot of things.
Prioritise Safety First and Foremost
If there’s one critical component of managing child care when upgrading your home, it’s about keeping the kids safe. It all depends on the age of your children, but if you’ve got children approaching ten years old, you might think that they can pay attention when you are telling them what would happen if they touched a certain power tool.
But when there’s major renovation work with a lot of sharp tools, rather than engaging in any form of debate, it’s far better to be strict and just keep kids away with no questions asked. Younger children like babies and toddlers are easier to look after, but you still need to use safety gates and barricades to ensure that the environment is secure.
Think About Their Health
Another thing to consider with regard to their safety is about keeping the air pure. This is something we don’t always bear in mind, and in fact, the magnitude of how much dust can float around a house soon becomes apparent when we’ve undertaken some renovation work. We should firstly keep our children away if there’s going to be a lot of dust, for example when sanding the walls.
It’s also worth doing your best to keep the air pure during the evenings. Little lungs can cough a lot, and investing in an air purifier can make a big difference. We can clean the house down after we’ve done any work, but the problem is that dust lingers in the air, so that air purifier can make a big difference in pulling those allergens out of the atmosphere.
Stick to Routines
Maintaining daily routines as much as possible is essential. It might seem like a little adventure in the short term when you are taking them out of the house while building work is going on, but the longer renovation work goes on, the tougher it can be to keep them occupied. As parents, we can feel stressed about the entire process because it’s taking too long or we are doing renovation work ourselves on weekends and evenings. Before you know it, exhaustion can creep in.
Sticking to routines as much as you can will help your children feel secure among so many changes. This also means less stress when it comes to bedtime and may potentially reduce those nighttime awakenings which can easily ramp up our exhaustion levels.
Dealing with the Stress and Emotions of It All
The stress of home upgrades and juggling family life can get the better of us. Navigating all of those emotional changes is tough, but there are many strategies that we can all use.
Problem-Solving Together
If there is one thing that can be problematic during a home upgrade, it’s a lack of communication. One partner may think that they need to take over the entire operation because they’ve got a specific vision, but open communication throughout the entire process is not just about deciding on the right colour of the wall or thickness of the lining paper to cover up those terrible walls, but about making sure that you can address any concerns and anxieties together.
When you problem solve together, approaching it as a team will strengthen your bonds in the long run. There will always be challenges, but it’s about making sure that you have the opportunities to discuss these issues. It’s so easy to get caught up in having to do so many different jobs that you invariably don’t communicate throughout the entire process. There can be a lot to do, but you can work far more efficiently if you anticipate certain problems and put a system in place.
Self-Care
One of those critical components that make a massive difference in any stressful situation. Self-care doesn’t need to involve 30-minute meditations, especially when you’ve got a lot to do in the evenings, but it’s about not feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks. Taking a couple of minutes out to calm yourself after a day’s work before you start stripping the wallpaper can be all you need to de-stress.
The trick is in making sure that you practise de-stressing on a regular basis rather than waiting for all of the pressures to build up so you feel incredibly overwhelmed. Self-care is about resting properly. If you struggle to sleep because of the number of things you need to do, there are a number of solutions here, including supplements like Magnesium and Myo-inositol that can, respectively, help you fall asleep and help you get back to sleep when you wake up in the middle of the night. It might also be the fact that you’re not eating well enough.
If falling asleep is difficult, just slightly up your carbohydrates, but you should also find time for relaxation. It is something that will take as long as it takes, and we can become very impatient that we’re not doing enough to get it done. But we have all heard stories about people who spent months doing up their home and it nearly killed them in the process. You’ve got to remember that you are a parent, and therefore you need to keep your strength for them, rather than burning the candle at both ends.
There is a lot to unpack here, but upgrading your property will take as long as it takes, and you have to bear in mind that no matter how long it takes, it will look amazing at the very end. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by this mountain of duties, addressing these different components based on your stress levels and needs will make it better for everyone.
