New House Renovation

Updated on 22-12-2015

There are many cases where house renovation was abandon or over budget or completed not as the owner wanted. Since this is my first time to do a major renovation, I would like to list out my procedure to do so and avoid the above problems.

1. Survey your dream renovation
    - make sure practical usage rather than glamour
    - several layers of renovations: most essential or minimum, must do now to avoid lost in future, safety, convenienc, estatic the last
    - must also consider future needs such as increasing number of children, children getting mature, you getting old, or your parents may live with you
    - my final renovation plan:

    - originally, there was on a bathroom at the back, it is splitted into two bathrooms (Bath 1 & 2) and enlarged.
    - the new room will have its own bathroom
    - dedicated bathroom for each room will ensure privacy to may children when they grow up. It can also ensure to minimize squabbles in the future. It is more expensive and difficult to split the bathroom in the future.
    - the side balcony will be enlarged so that the new room can have its own access door. In addition, the enlarged balcony can protect the ground floor doors during rain. The enlarged balcony can also ensure the family hall to become bigger when I have a high number of guests.

2. Select your contractor: minimum meet 5 contractors from different background
    - local and farther away
    - successful vs small business
    - single vs complete team
    - time, how strong their financial, current and pass projects, pictures, site visit etc.
    - it is alright if some of the contractors refuse to give any quotation. The project might be too big for the contractors. But, you can still explore ideas from them what and how to do the renovation.
    - most of the ideas I collected different contractors. Some of the ideas surfaced in my mind during the conversation with them or after discussion with them.

The first action was to build the foundation

3. Agreement
    - this is the part where most people are lazy and lead them to trouble in the future
    - al quran advise us to write down when dealing a business. Thus verbal agreement is not enough. Handshakings are not enough. The agreement must be written!
    - write down all you want to have or renovate
    - ask contractor to write how are they going to do and progress schedule
    - put forward a propose budget
    - merge two together
    - sign it
    - it is something I cannot show in public. But it is alright in private discussion.

4. Payment by progress
    - agree first on what to be completed in specific time and fund
    - agree first what to inspect
    - next payment only all work progress were done

Demolish the kitchen and store room so that the dinning hall is bigger

5. Payment
    - no cash
    - NEVER PAY ALL THE MONEY AT ONCE!!
    - payment must be made progressively as agreed in 3.
    - all electronically for tracebility, account
    - use more than a single account if you use personal saving account

3rd day work in progress

6. Monitor the progress
    - is an art, time, you can also learn something from the activity
    - cannot trust 100% everything is ok
    - watch , ask and learn a lot

4th day work in progress

5th day work in progress

I will continue update the work in progress in the future.