The Old House Restoration Budget List I Wish We Knew About Sooner

Our old house restoration budget has definitely contained a few items that caught us off guard. Here are a few unexpected but common things that I wish we’d budgeted for earlier.

Budgeting for the process of restoring an old house is something that takes a lot of thought and careful consideration, but even after that, there will probably be some budgetary adventures that come up that will catch you off guard. When we first moved into our 120-year-old farmhouse, we had just sold our townhouse in the city and we had a bit of equity built up to help us get started. We had completed a lot of renovations on our previous home, so we felt like we had a good idea of what things would cost, but we didn’t really sit down and create a formal budget. Our spending plan was more of an intention to just do what we could over time and see where the adventure would take us, and honestly, it probably wasn’t the best way of going about it. Having a specific budget for this renovation would have allowed us to start certain projects earlier without fear that we would run out of money, and also would have led us to do a lot more research about what things will cost and what will be realistic in the timeframe we had in mind. If you’re just in the planning stages for your renovation, and you’re smart enough to create an actual budget, here are some of the line items I would account for that might surprise you, based on our experience with this old house.

The Simplest Way to Create a Home Renovation Budget

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If you’re just starting out with your budget-making process, I would keep things very basic, and then start adding in line items as you gain more information. First, create several headings, listing off the spaces you’d like to tackle, and including a “whole home” category as well for improvements you’ll need to make that will affect the entire house such a major utility updates or a new roof.

From there, list of what you’d like to do in each space and then you can start to gather information about how much each home improvement task will cost. It’s becoming more and more common to use AI-driven financial planning resources to gain knowledge about how much different home updates typically cost in a specific area, and how to best utilize the funds you have available to tackle the project ahead. Having a clear picture of what you want to do and how you’re going to pay for it can reduce stress and make the whole process so much more enjoyable. If you want to be really realistic (and you should) here are the items I would reserve a good amount of budget for that you won’t see on most home-building budget planners.

More inspiration for making your adventure: How to Quit Your Job in the City and Move to the Country

The “Well, We Might As Well Go All-In” Budget

As much as we like to think the process of remodelling a home is a logical process, the truth is that there is a lot of emotion involved. We’re human and sometimes we get excited, get new ideas, or want to do more just because we want to do more. At some point during your home makeover, this will happen. Plan for it. You’ll start a project, get the demo process underway, start moving towards the space of your dreams and realize that, while you’re at it, you might as well add that dream fireplace to the space. Or maybe you should just do the bathroom at the same time as the kitchen since you’ll have the contractor in your home anyway. Project scopes expand, renovations that you were saving for another year suddenly get moved up, and your remodel costs suddenly expand. If you expect this to happen, you’ll be prepared and relaxed when inspiration strikes.

The “Things Our Home Inspector Conveniently Didn’t See” Budget

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Here’s the thing: Home inspectors are part of the real estate industry. It’s in their best interest to make sure a home sale will go through. The real estate agent typically is the one to recommend a home inspector to their client, and if that home inspector calls out so many issues with a house that the sale falls through, the real estate agent won’t be very happy with them and probably won’t recommend them again. While home inspectors take great pride in their work, and absolutely will give you a lot of guidance about what needs to be taken care of in your new home, there’s a good chance that they won’t tell you everything. That might be a bit of a cynical way of looking at it, but it’s just reality. Unfortunately, we didn’t really realize the reality of the situation until years later when we came to the understanding that our home inspector absolutely did leave a few things out when he was going through our home with us.

The types of things we ran into were severe water damage in our bathroom around the shower and a very badly leaking roof in a few places. The inspector told us that this was an old issue that had been fixed, but when we moved in, we realized that it was, in fact, a very current issue and it was very obvious. Many thousands of dollars later, we had the issues resolved, but it would have been very helpful to know about them at the time of the inspection. Plan for a few big surprises here, no matter how highly-recommended your home inspector is.

Read next: What You Can Really Expect Whey You Buy a 100-Year-Old Farmhouse

The “Everyday Life is More Expensive Than You Realize” Budget

This comes into play more so when you’re doing your overall household budget and planning for how the renovation costs are going work fit in with your everyday living expenses. When we get excited about a renovation, we have a tendency to think that we’ll be able to allocate a larger portion of our monthly income towards renovation expenses than what is actually possible. We often think that we’ll live off very little and that the thrill of the renovation process will carry us through any lifestyle sacrifices that we’ll be making. The truth is, though, that the fun and resolve of a new renovation project lasts a few weeks before you start to get tired of daily sacrifices, and restoring a historic home is often an undertaking that lasts years, and in some cases, it’s really a lifetime project. It’s wise to allocate a larger part of your budget to everyday life expenses than you think necessary, so that when unexpected costs come up outside of the renovation project or when you just want to enjoy your life a little bit, you don’t feel completely derailed.

Although our renovation has definitely been an adventure, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a similar journey to someone else who feels the pull to revive an older home, just make sure you do a little planning first. 🙂

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