Tips to Save Money on Your Renovation

hey guys welcome back to Nelson construction and renovations we're going to give you some tips to help you save money on your home renovation project [Music] we are Greg Nelson and Dominique Nelson we're the owners of Nelson construction and renovations in Florida I've been a Florida State licensed building contractor since 2006 I've been working in construction all my life and we love building custom homes and helping homeowners create their dream homes so we're gonna share a few tips from our experience to help you save money on your home renovation number one get contractor pricing don't buy everything at Home Depot that would be like buying your groceries at a health food store versus shopping at Costco you're always gonna save money if you shop wholesale you can use the internet to find all your local vendors there's quite a few in most areas particularly in our area we have banning lumber builders first-choice Tibbets and a list of other lumber suppliers and building construction houses the general public don't really know about for drywall supplies particularly we use Gator gypsum in our area and a lot of people don't know this but a drywall supply house it is very customary for unlike a whole order of 50 sheets of drywall and more for them to come and deliver the material and actually put in each room the sheets that you want in each room that's part of the service and usually delivery is free with a place like Home Depot they're gonna charge you minimally seventy five dollars just to deliver it and they will not bring it inside the building they'll only leave it at the street and if you do have to buy at Home Depot there are a few tricks that you can use if you have all of your planning done and you've specified everything in your home then you can bring your list to the pro desk and you can actually open up a commercial credit account and give them your list and they will actually shop your list and find you the best price however that does mean that you need to have all your planning done and have everything sucked out and ready to be ordered generally Home Depot won't do anything like that on orders that are under $2,000 so assuming you're doing a good size project you can get pricing that will compare to some of the larger vendors that we were just speaking about but that you need to make sure that you know it's a large order then the produce will take it and what they do is they bid it out and they shop it out for you and they can compete but still you have to understand if you're gonna buy it at Home Depot it's going to be dropped off at the curb or you're gonna have to pick it up yourself so there is quite a bit of Labor that's going to be involved with getting the materials off the shelf and into your job now that brings up one of the most important ways to save money on a construction project and that is get your planning completed ahead of time and don't change anything when construction is underway for instance if you look here at these Scotts lights here behind Dominique this took a little bit of planning to figure out exactly where these go we actually specified the mirror that is going to be put between these two this is a double vanity area here we specified the mirror with the thickness of the frame and we specified the actual sconce light that will go and each on each side of the mirror here this is the example of completed planning in complete planning would be throwing these up doing all the wire makeups getting the inspections covering this up with drywall putting up all your tape in your mud priming it painting it putting in your vanity and then somebody decides to get a different sconce light and the sconce light the back plate is too big and it now goes into the mirror now you have to change the mirror or you have to change the sconce light or god help us all we have to rip the drywall off and relocate these boxes again that is the epitome of losing money and in complete planning so if you want to make a project go nice and smooth and quick and get it done the right the first time then pick your lights pick your mirror put it in the right spot and don't change it yeah that's key another example is on one of our projects there was a designer working on working with the homeowner and they had everything Specht out we were into construction and we had drywall up and we were to finish plumbing and then the designer and the homeowner walked through and decided you know what I think this master bathroom would actually look great with some wall-mounted faucets do you mind just changing that for me well that involves pulling off the drywall and completely redoing the plumbing so that the faucets would come out of the wall as opposed to be in different locations so the change order was considerably higher than she was expecting because she wasn't thinking with everything behind the wall so you've got to make sure you think everything through right from the beginning all the way to the end and at the end of the day the contractor your contractor does want to get your job done for you and the contractor can almost be looked at like the bad guy because he's the one that has to deliver hey here's how much extra that's going to cost to do what you want and if the homeowner is working with a designer that's drawing or showing the dream then the upset really goes towards the contractor because the contractor is the one that has to deliver the bad news that hey we have to reconfigure all your plumbing in the wall and take the drywall off and put valves behind them above the countertop because you want wall-mounted faucets now so it's really important to get your planning done and try not to change it yeah like don't go on Pinterest after you've decided on your sconce lights just end it and just let the contractor do his work you will save yourself so much money and so much time because in addition to the additional cost you also have scheduling of subcontractors so a lot of homeowners will think oh well it's you know it's only a day or two to have the plumber come in and switch out all the plumbing well that plumber works for five other clients so he's not necessarily going to show up the next day so if you make that change that jobs going to go on hold maybe we might be able to do bit of work around it but that is definitely going to cause delays depending on the plumbers schedule when you can come back and do that change order so just make sure you're thinking with that you delay the plumber you're going to delay installation of the cabinet chicken to do a templating the countertops you're going to do play delay the inspections you're going to delay the drywaller and the ripple effect is intense and unless you're a seasoned and you've been through the drill several times it's really hard to really get that but take it from the professionals we've been doing this for almost 15 years in Florida and making a change like that just has terrible ripple effects in the whole project anything that slows down the project or or any kind of incomplete planning really is always the stem of going over budget going too long or going over budget yep number three choose high quality materials now this may seem contradictory when we're talking about saving money but in the long run this is a sure way to lose money if you select very cheap materials yeah and the long and short of it is after analyzing about a thousand different budgets and building new houses renovating houses and then looking back we do a lot of analyzing of our numbers at the end of a job and it's pretty much a pattern unless you're using really expensive high quite rare products that any project like the the budget is about two-thirds of any budget is is in your labor it's the cost to install the materials the cost of the materials as far as the sticks and bricks and the and them and the mortar and the and the things that are needed to construct the home overall is a very only about a third of the cost of the job so why compromise on cheaper materials I mean hey guys unless we're building six hundred townhomes all at once I get it maybe use something that's a couple dollars a square foot cheaper on the sheathing that you use or something like that and you save fifteen or twenty thousand dollars but when you're building a custom home or renovating a house for somebody in the grand scheme of things you pay an extra two or three hundred dollars and you get some really nice materials some really good dry two-by-fours a good example like on our projects we don't use oriented strand board for our our plywood our exterior sheathing it meets Building Code it's allowed anywhere in Florida but I refuse to put it on any of my jobs and the reason is is because it's crap and it turns to mush when it gets wet it can sponge up and can create situations where mole will occur it'll get wet and then dry and it'll dry so much after it gets wet it'll turn into kindling I've even seen it begin to start on fire in a hot day so we just won't use it and it's supposed to be a structural component on any on any structure is your roof sheathing and your wall sheathing is supposed to structurally you're the envelope for your house so we only use CDX plywood it's more per sheet but you know it's you know another thousand dollars on a job as opposed to you know compromising in the structural integrity of the home so we don't mess around with those types of things when it comes to your finishes and your appliances and stuff yes you can get you know really nice appliances in a really nice tile but even like look at a house that's 3,000 square foot we had a customer one time that wanted this really nice marble stone throughout the home and it was $12.75 of square foot well our designers found something that was made out of porcelain that looked very close we actually found two different products and it was I think seven dollars or 650 a square foot we saved them thousands of dollars and we just looked around for something that was comparable yeah it wasn't marble but it was looked just fine so if you're willing to compromise with a couple of things like you know on the looks you can even find really high quality finished materials as well another example is paint a lot of homeowners will try to go with the cheap paint but we found that to be very unworkable and on our projects we only use Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams because anything I think a couple projects we we tried that because the homeowner trying to save money and it just always ended up a disaster you know the the finish looked terrible and it just wasn't worth it and the wall had to be redone anyway so really it is important to just use high quality materials just invest in it and then you'll just never have to worry about it again you can enjoy the beauty of your home here's a little trick you can use in the kitchen if your budget is really tight and that is using open shelving instead of cabinets now when you install cabinets you've got the boxes you've got the doors you've got the hardware there's a lot you can do with that you can get stock cabinets from Home Depot you can get semi-custom you can get custom cabinets and obviously that's all costs material labor however if you're really really tight there is it is trending right now to have open shelving in the kitchen if you're okay with having your crockery and and dishware on display so that is one option if you're really tight on your budget [Music] the other thing that's cool about open shelving is that number one it is kind of a going trend and number two you can always add upper cabinets later so let's say you're just you're just trying to get the job done you want to move back in and you just you know the kitchens just they tend to like draw a lot of money per square foot kitchens and bathrooms can generally always cost a lot more per square foot and a lot of that does go into the cabinets and the the most cost impacting part of the cabinet really goes into the door doors are made of hardwood maple cherry what-have-you and there's many different kinds but if you're okay to just go with some open shelves for the time being and go ahead and deck out the lower cabinets get an island in there put some counter tops on it and then do some open shelves maybe a year goes by and you can have your cabinet maker or by the other the matching uppers put them in at that time another place you can save money is on your countertops a lot of people love marble and granite but that can definitely be pricey concrete countertops if you're willing to do the ultimate DIY you can try casting and polishing and concrete countertops however if you do hire a professional to do concrete countertops keep in mind that that is a handcrafted handmade product so it is gonna be pricier but if you're really trying to save money then you can go with butcher block which is trending right now yeah and just on that note on concrete countertops my experience was in the area of architectural precast and I used to do a lot of slabs and I used to pour concrete stairs and a lot of stuff like that and about six years ago I got into doing a lot of concrete countertops in our shop and we were finding that what we needed to charge in order to make money doing it it just couldn't compete with your normal solid surface like granite and marble it was we were starting around one hundred and hundred and ten dollars a square foot was what we really needed to charge it you know honestly at the end of the day it's it's handmade it's a piece of art it tells the story that the family that lives there you have to be wanting and putting concrete countertops in your house it has a very it creates a very unique feel and look into the project and you have to you have to go and see what they look like before you want to do that but they do object they do absolutely inject a uniqueness into the design of the house most the times when we're doing concrete countertops were being asked to design something very custom by a client's designer and it's usually going in a very very high-end home multi-million dollar homes if you look in veranda magazine or dwell I'm going to say 90% of the countertops in those homes are all concrete but they're done by concrete artisans and their total artists about four or five years ago there was only maybe a handful of people in the US that were doing it now there's thousands it is something that you can do on your own as a dy I thing a really good resource for that would be foo Tong Chang out of Seattle he's one of the authorities and concrete countertops and buddy roads out of San Francisco they were like the pioneers that really started it you can buy a lot of their products that make it easier so they take the guesswork out of doing the mixing and stuff like that sometimes we're asked to do a concrete countertops on our projects we just don't do them anymore we do have a couple local people that we subcontract to but but they but you a homeowner can do concrete tops in their own kitchen and you can actually get a 5000 psi mix that's endorsed by food Tong King at Home Depot it's it's good for a wet cast poured-in-place concrete countertop there's a lot of resources on this and 4d DIY and if you guys want to know some more information about concrete countertops I have tons of information I've personally poured I don't know 50 60 different concrete countertops with cast sinks monolithically poured sinks and drain boards and I've done pressed finishes with veins and all sorts of stuff like that personally and we'll show you some pictures of those that we've done but yeah if you want to you want to save money the material itself is very inexpensive the best way to do it is to make the form on your countertops you can make it if you do it that way you can eliminate seams there's a lot of information about concrete countertops but if you get a professional to do it you're definitely gonna end up spending more than you would on it's gonna be on top of them what you would pay for marble the other thing with concrete countertops too is that you want to really make sure that you research the sealers that was the biggest issue when it first started coming out and there's a lot of hybrid sealers right now concrete is very porous I would say it's about 7 to 12 percent more pores than granite so you have to use the right kind of sealer and there's some really good sealers that are on the market now a good resource for that is sure creep out of Jacksonville ok but if you want to save money on your countertops then butcher block is a really good inexpensive way to go some people might not want to do butcher block in your entire kitchen so you could maybe do it on an island or on a section of the countertops either way it will save money wood is timeless it is trending right now so we would recommend that if you want to save money and if you really really want to save money just buy a sheet of OSB plywood and stick it on there and paint with some bear paint from Home Depot [Music] number six saving money on exterior materials yeah like if you want to use stucco instead of side siding you can generally save money but again you can get into higher-end finishes in stucco depending on how much profile and detail you want to integrate into it there's a lot of different vinyl corner beads and casement beads that can create design in the stucco or features around windows or what-have-you there's also different types of finish like Spanish knife and Mediterranean knockdown as opposed to just a simple float finish we've done tabby finishes on some houses that's where it's kind of a white cement and you cast your broadcast shells into it seashells that's called tabby but you're you're gonna save a lot of money if you just stay with a normal sanded floated finish and that's where you just use a float sponge float and you get the you hit it at the right time and it kind of pulls some of the sand out and it's very easy for the Installer to do that put it on top a high rib laughs or right on top of the block if you're on top of a wood building you got to use laughs but you can definitely save money doing stucco as a parent pose to like cement a shoes fiber cement finishes fiber cement siding or machiya Elora Hardy board those are definitely cost more to install and they cost more for the material and again like we said earlier most of your cost is going to lean on the labor and it's a it's a lot more takes more skilled labor your technician that's needed to install fiber siding or any kind of shingle siding or what-have-you he's gonna need to be a seasoned carpenter he's gonna be a 25 to a $35 an hour carpenter and he's gonna be reading tape measures using chop saws he's doing precision work as opposed to a stucco crew well you've got eight block tenders or mason tenders you know an assistance and you know one guy technician that knows how to actually do the floating so you're gonna save money in that another way you can save money too is on your roofing if you stay with a nice architectural shingle that's a that's a decent roof 15 year 12 year warranty as opposed to going with like a tile four barrel tile roof or metal roof metal roofs just start going like double the cost your roof at least 30 40 percent higher than what you would pay with architectural shingle I will tell you however stay away from three tab three tab roof shingle is an asphalt shingle system it is the bottom of the bottom of cheap and you know you got a couple years out of one of those roofs I don't care what anybody says that's the worst thing to put on your home don't ever use a three tab roof it'll meet code but don't do that architectural shingles you can get really good deals on very decent roofs like that another good material to save on is like pavers if you wanted to go with an actual reclaimed brick yeah that's gonna look really cool when it's done but those take a lot of money those do cost a lot of money they're generally right out of Detroit or Chicago and they take down an old cigar factory and they actually tumble them and they get the old mortar and the thinset off of them and they you know they clean them up and there's quite a bit of work to prepare them to be reinstalled they do look stellar when they're installed on driveways and on side of houses but if you wanted to save some money you could go with a concrete paver and you can get lots of color options with those two and they look they look fine they just don't look old and and cool thanks for watching our video if there's anything else you'd like to know about just mention it in the comments below and don't forget to subscribe you [Music]

Channel: Nelson Construction And Renovations, Inc.

Views: 1,808

Keywords: Tips to save money on your renovation, how to save money on a renovation, renovation tips, remodeling on a budget, contractor advice, how to remodel for cheap, cheap renovations, construction on a budget, should I renovate my home by myself?, should I do my own renovations or hire a contractor?, should I hire a contractor to remodel my home?, concrete countertops, DIY home renovations, saving money on a renovation, diy home remodeling on a budget, remodeling house

Id: en7rxeEfiQk

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020