A guide to living on-site during a renovation

You’ve got grand plans for a renovation but the question is “can we still live here while we renovate?”. The short answer is….yes. Yes you can!

With the rise in living costs, it’s not financially viable for many home owners who are renovating to find alternative accomodation. There is the choice of living with friends or family but often, we feel a huge burden by moving in with loved ones.

This leaves us with with living on site during the renovation.

But, there are a few things to consider before embarking on this journey and we’re here to give you some tips and considerations we’ve learnt while renovating our own home and working alongside our clients.

Have a plan

Before the renovation begins, thorough planning is essential. Discuss the renovation timeline with your contractor to get a clear idea of how long the project will take. This will help you make arrangements accordingly and set realistic expectations.
There is also planning needed on your end. You need to plan where you are going to sleep, eat and bathe. Make these arrangements before anything starts! Do you you have fur babies? Where will they be during the renovation?

Set up temporary spaces to live in

This is an essential part of any renovation where you are living on site. We like to have a minimum of two spaces that are untouched and have some sort of normality. For example, this could be a bedroom where you sleep and watch TV. And then perhaps a garage set up for cooking and chilling out. Where ever it is, make sure that it’s not a throughway for contractors.

Think about your temporary space before the renovation starts and set it up before any demolition begins. You want to avoid having to move your things multiple times when it’s not necessary.
For our current project, we decided to start with the hallway, bathroom and spare room. Once these spaces were functional, we then moved onto the kitchen, living and master bedroom. Staging allowed us to have temporary spaces that were still usable.

Keep your belongings safe, keep yourself safe

Ensure your belongings are stored safely and if they cannot be moved, cover them! Zen Builders always goes the extra mile to cover carpets and furniture with protective coverings however, you want to think about this yourself. It’s also a good idea to take down blinds and curtains to avoid damage and dust. Oh and while we’re on that, yes…dust. Be warned, there will be plenty!

It’s also super important to keep yourself and your family safe during a renovation. Your contractor will have a site meeting with you and discuss health and safety. You can then have a family meeting to talk to share any important points, this is especially important if you have children. It’s so tempting to want to visit the work site often but you need to remember it is just that…a work site. Remember, health and safety is everyones responsibility.

Maintain routine

Try to keep your routine fairly normal. Though the space you are living in may have changed, your routine doesn’t need to. We know that once you fall into the “takeaways every-night” phase, it’s difficult to break and you won’t feel great. Keep up the gym, keep cooking your meals, go to bed at a reasonable time.

Stay flexible

When you live on site you will see the day to day runnings of a building site. You need to be very mindful of delays and being flexible when the timeline changes. If something doesn’t happen on the day it was supposed to, don’t panic. Your contractors will be very grateful for your flexibility.

Take breaks

Plan trips or outings during the renovation process. This will give you time away from the site and something to look forward to. You may even have the opportunity to stay with friends or family for a short while. We recently house sat for 3 weeks while our friends went overseas. We were able to have hot showers and cook in a real kitchen while our bathroom and kitchen were out of action. This was massive for our mental health.

Practise patience, celebrate progress

Things change. Go into the renovation with this at the forefront of your mind. Though you will be eager to get the renovations completed, there will be challenges along the way. If you expect it, it makes it easier to deal with when it happens. Patience, patience, patience.