How To Avoid Hidden Home Renovation Costs | Homestead Custom Carpentry

Home renovation projects can quickly become overwhelming, stressful, and costly. Whether its a bathroom, basement, whole home remodel, or kitchen renovation, hidden renovation costs can add up. At Homestead Custom Carpentry Red Deer, we work on home renovation projects daily. We see homeowners troubled with picking materials, hiring professionals from different trades and finalizing design plans. With a project as significant and treasured as your home, it’s important to organize what you need and plan the process to avoid unnecessary costs and issues. He re are some tips on things to remember when renovating the different rooms in your home to avoid making costly mistakes and stay on budget.

Kitchenkitchen renovation before and after

  • Countertops & Flooring – Installation Costs Vary

When picking your countertops and flooring, keep in mind, installation costs vary from material to material.

  • Installing solid-surface and stone countertops costs exponentially more than laminate countertops.
  • Similarly, laminate flooring is less expensive to install than a ceramic tile.
  • The most cost-effective flooring materials are floating floor systems, like cork planks or tiles. These are significantly less expensive to install than glue-down or nail-down systems. Check out NuFloors Cork Flooring
  • Identify Load-Bearing Walls

If you are thinking of opening up your kitchen space and need to tear down a wall, identify load-bearing walls first! Look in your attic or basement to see where the pipes or ducts are running into the wall and look for registers and radiators. This will help you avoid ruining existing electrical wiring or plumbing when removing a wall.

  • Think Before Switching Between Gas & Electric

Nothing makes a kitchen feel luxurious and gourmet like new, state-of-the-art appliances. If your kitchen renovation includes buying a new stove or oven it can be really expensive to switch from gas to electric or vice versa. Before ordering the new appliance, remember, a gas line upgrade or extension or running a new circuit to the switchboard can quickly add costs.

Explore our kitchen renovation services.

Bathroom

A bathroom renovation white checkered linoleum toilet countertop, plant, and baby blue wall and window

A complete bathroom renovation

  • Remember Wiring When Making Changes

If you want to change the design of your bathroom layout, keep in mind that it could affect where you need lights, outlets and light switches. To be budget-friendly, consider the cost of hiring an electrician to upgrade the wiring when planning your layout.

  • Waterproofing!

Baths, showers, toilet malfunctions or even your kids splashing in the sink, make your bathroom the wettest place in your home. It’s important to be especially diligent with waterproofing your floors and walls and making sure they are warrantied and certified. This step might be more expensive immediately but long term you will save big on maintenance.

  • Think About Drainage With A New Tub Or Toilet

If your bathroom renovation or remodel involves buying new or relocating the bath or toilet in your bathroom, take special consideration of where the drain is (middle or end in the bath). With anything new, make sure the drain can be connected to the existing drainage point so you don’t have the additional expense of adding a new drainage line.

Explore our bathroom renovation services.

Basement

interior basement renovation basement red deer

an interior basement renovation basement red deer

  • The Rooms You Need

Consider the rooms you need in your basement space. Open spaces are a lot less expensive to renovate. Separating your basement into a bathroom, wet bar, office or bedroom means more materials, wiring and plumbing.

  • Carpet – Your Best Companion

When developing or renovating your basement consider carpet, rather than hardwood, laminate or tile. In the case of flooding or any serious water damage, carpet can be replaced multiple times and is significantly less expensive to install than any alternative. We work with Alberta Tile One in Red Deer

  • Prevent Water Damage

Basements tend to naturally be more humid and moisture prone than the rest of the home. Before renovating, look for signs of moisture problems (like mould or watermarks) and inspect your foundation for cracks that may be contributing to the issues. Fixing these may incur more initial costs but will help you save long term with future water damage repair costs.

interior basement renovations red deer

Explore our basement renovation services

Home renovation projects can be daunting but there is nothing more rewarding than the final project. Relaxing with your family in your newly remodelled dream home is the best feeling in the world. The only thing that can take away from that feeling is a price tag that went way over your initial budget. If you stay organized and consider the details of each room, you should be able to save on unforeseen expenses and stay under budget on your next home renovation project.

Check out our GALLERY of completed home renovation projects

church auditorium commercial enovation

Living Stones Church Renovation

auditorium of church with pews commercial church renovation in red deer

LIVING STONES: 8 WEEKS LATER

Over a span of 8 weeks, Homestead has had the incredible opportunity to take on a major church renovation at LivingStones Church in Red Deer. Besides being a great project allowing for some creative design work, we particularly enjoyed this one, as Living Stones has been the home church for both mine and Brent’s families for several years now.
When people ask me what I enjoy most about doing renovations, I always tell them it’s being able to witness the transformation that occurs in every space we work on. Even though a project from A to Z can take time, but it is very rewarding for us to watch our renovation clients take a sign of relief and joy when they see the completed project.

SOME UPDATES

lobby church commercial church renovation in red deer

When we started this church renovation at the beginning of August, in my humble opinion, many of the church fixtures appeared in need of some modern updates, in particular the golden oak chair rail in the foyer, and pink/green carpeted stage in the sanctuary.
Rather than scrapping several hundred dollars worth of hardwood, we elected to have our cabinetmaker, Dave Gollum of Timberwolf Cabinetry, re-purpose the chair rail into some beautiful standing coffee tables for the foyer area. Other foyer renovation updates included new info kiosks, reupholstered and additional acoustical sound panels on the walls and ceiling, new paint, and floor-to-ceiling decorative signage panels added along the north wall.
Expanding and updating the stage was one of my favorite parts of this church renovation.
After framing in the expansion, we one of our business partners, NuFloors, provide and install some beautiful vinyl plank, which created a more modern look, and had the added benefit of helping to dampen vibrations and excess noise, adding to the acoustics of the room. The new sound, lighting and video systems, provided by Big Guy Productions, provided the icing on the cake for the sanctuary facelift. In addition, many thanks to Kevin of High Energy Electric, for great work done and many hours spent running wire through the ceiling, to power it all.

LOOKS GOODcompleted auditorium of church renovation in red deer

As this project drew to a close, I can honestly say being a part of this large church renovation has been a satisfying and enjoyable experience, especially for a place we attend. Homestead Custom Carpentry would like to thank the following business partners, for all their hard work and a job well done on Living Stones Church renovation:
 – Central Alberta Tile One
 – High Energy Electric
 – Timberwolf Cabinetry
 –  NuFloors
 – Big Guy Productions
 – ERA Ventures – Full service drywall and painting corporation

 

Commercial Renovation - A Yoga Studio - Homestead Custom Carpentry

Commercial Renovation – A Yoga Studio

Breathing New Life Into a Yoga Studio

yoga studio stettler commercial renovationOne of my favourite things about commercial renovations is the variety of projects and people that I get to work with on a daily basis. Given the wide scope of work – commercial renovations and residential renovations – that we take on and the uniqueness of each project, it seems there is always a new challenge or opportunity just waiting around the corner. Recently, the Homestead Custom Carpentry team was pleased to take on a new commercial renovation project for some esteemed long-term clients of ours in Stettler, Alberta.

A few years back, we had renovated the offices of Central Vision & Hearing, one of the Stettler’s foremost health service providers in Central Alberta. Having kept up a positive relationship over the years, they called us back to develop some unused office space on the second floor of their adjacent building, with hopes of repurposing it into a functioning yoga studio. Excuse me for getting too metaphorical here, but given that the essence of yoga is about finding inner transformation and balance, it seems only fitting that this commercial renovation project would breathe new life into a building that had sat vacant for many years.

As is typical for any commercial renovation project,

DEMOLITION

Demolition was our first step, and involved taking down the walls of several of the individual offices and removing the flooring back to the subfloor, in order to create one large usable space. The ceiling was suspended acoustic tile (also known as T-bar, which I personally love working with as it provides easy access to furnace ductwork and other components), however this created a small challenge in that the ceiling height in a portion of the main room was about 12 inches lower that in the offices, and supported by one of the walls to be removed.

FRAMING

This problem was solved by framing in a suspended beam, supported overhead from the ceiling joists. These provided a fastening point for the T-bar molding channel on both sides and a smooth transition between the differing ceiling height levels. ​

The next step was to frame in a wall to partition our newly created main floor space from the rest of the undeveloped office space (as we were only renovating about half of the second floor). We also stripped back the drywall and plywood caps along the window ledges, which were in serious need of some attention. We added a vapor barrier to cover the insulation in the exterior walls, and also set to work preparing the subfloor for new flooring, removing any nails, staples, or glue residue that might get in the way.

As the commercial renovation project was proceeding, our sub-trades were also hard at work – running wire and new lights, hooking up new waterlines, installing and finishing drywall, painting, replacing the ceiling grid, and many other necessary tasks for completing a renovation. A special thanks to Stettler Electric, Action Plumbing & Excavating, and Sun Interiors, for all the excellent work your crews put in – we couldn’t have done it without you

FLOORING

One of the last steps before completion was to install flooring, a “Drop & Done” faux wood vinyl plank provided by Divine Flooring, a local Red Deer flooring renovation partner. I find it a fantastic product, as it’s easy to install, durable, cost-efficient, and if by chance a piece is scratched or damaged, it has the added capability of being able to replace a single plank without needing to take up the whole floor. If you are ever thinking about putting in some new flooring, I would highly recommend this product.
 
Completion of this newly renovated yoga studio wrapped up at the end of May, just in time for Central Vision & Hearing’s new tenants to take possession at the beginning of June, and begin making use of this transformed space. I’m proud to have been a part of this project, and hope we’ll see more like it in the future.