How To Prepare To Make Green Updates To Your Home

When you think you’re ready to dive into a home renovation to make your house more eco-friendly, you should still pause and take time to prepare. From readying your family for the time commitment to finding the best contractor for you – there’s a lot to consider when you want to make your home more modern with green updates.

Commitment and timeline

The task of bringing your home into this century by making it more earth-friendly means a big-time commitment that needs to be considered well ahead of time.

When we say commitment, we mean the personal time commitment and the overall effect the project will have on your family’s day-to-day life.

For starters, meetings with contractors, financial advisors, and even your family will take up some time in your already busy schedule to prepare for the project. Then, once the project starts, you may learn that simple tasks can become difficult or take longer than usual.

For example, if you’re updating your flooring for a more modern and eco-friendly option, you may realize this can derail activities in your daily routine like getting ready or cooking a meal. Finally, inclement weather may disrupt your desired timeline; you may not be able to do certain renovations in the midst of Cincinnati winter, even if that’s the most convenient with your schedule.

That’s why it’s important to provide a realistic look into your life for your contractor beforehand and to inform your family of how the update could affect their lives on a daily basis.

Figuring out finances

Once you’re ready to move forward with your desired green updates, planning out your finances is a vital first step. This may require a sit-down conversation with your partner or a financial advisor to determine your budget and where exactly you can pull money from.

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When making luxurious updates to your home, that doesn’t always come at a cheap price, nor should you want it to! Paying for the right people to do the best job is important, and we’ll get into that in-depth later. However, this means that you might not have the cash to remodel or add to your home sitting in your bank account ready to be withdrawn.

If you’re bringing an older house up-to-date, you may be able to take advantage of your home equity with a loan or by refinancing to free up some cash. Should this not be an option, you can finance the update with a personal loan or a credit card to make it more manageable. If opening a line of credit doesn’t appeal to you, then make sure your timeline reflects that you may have to wait a little bit longer to update your home to save money or sell items you no longer need.

Determining the best financial option will depend on your reasoning for updating your home; if you’re updating your home to sell, meeting with a financial advisor, realtor, and your partner will be the best way to determine where to get the money for the updates.

Hiring the right people

When you’re scouting a contractor, there are a few different details to take into consideration. Of course, the first being price. You need to ensure the company you want fits into your desired budget, especially if you plan to pay for the renovation with cash only. Next, it’s important that you trust the contractor you’re working with; this trust may come from your family or friends who’ve recently done a home renovation or it may come from research.

If you’re selling your home, even get in touch with your realtor for recommendations, as they know many people in the business. Even speaking with a building company beforehand, learning their best practices and values, and setting up meetings, they can gain your trust. For example, when looking for eco-friendly updates, you may want to stick with a contractor that uses the newest technology to make updates around your house.

There are a lot of steps to consider to feel ready to take on a home renovation.

Once you’ve decided on the timeframe, budget, and who to hire you know you’ll be prepared to take this step in selling your home or building your forever home!