Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation

Renovation can be awful. It's not like the television shows - it's dirtier, harder and more stressful than any close-up can capture. It doesn't matter if you live in an apartment and need to repaint the lounge room or if you live in a harbourside mansion and need to rebuild the entire house, you can just about guarantee that things you haven't anticipated will go wrong, the budget will blow out and you'll want to shout at someone. But help is at hand. Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation is your blueprint to a stress-free, well-planned and well-budgeted renovation that improves the value of your home. It helps you to plan a renovation to suit your available time, experience and money. It will also: * Introduce you to the three R's: repairs, refurbishment and rebuilding * Provide examples of room-by-room mission statements for easy planning * Show you how to work out cost estimates and schedules * Help you to build good relationships with builders and tradespeople * Show you what happened in three real renovations: in a unit, a brick-veneer house and a semi * Give you lots of money-saving and design tips * Include help

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction to renovatingChapter 2 The buck starts hereChapter 3 The real value of renovatingChapter 4 Your heart's desire: working out what you wantChapter 5 Plans, estimates and schedulesChapter 6 Repairs and maintenance: make it a mantraChapter 7 RefurbishingChapter 8 RebuildingChapter 9 KitchensChapter 10 BathroomsChapter 11 Living and sleeping areasChapter 12 Dealing with builders and tradesChapter 13 Sarah and Tim renovate a unitChapter 14 Tom and Belinda renovate a brick-veneer houseChapter 15 Roy and Camille renovate a semiChapter 16 The final word on planningA glossaryHandy websites