If you’re living in your ideal location but not in your ideal home, you’re most likely considering renovating or extending your existing home to better suit your lifestyle. But before you do, make sure you consider whether it may be a smarter move to knock down your current home and build the home you’ve always dreamed of.
To help you weigh up the pros and cons of both options, here are some of the pitfalls you may encounter if you decide to renovate and some reasons why starting again from scratch could be a better decision.
Renovating pitfalls
It’s not hard to work out why renovating is an appealing option for many home owners.
Most renovators find the idea of adapting their existing home to suit their current lifestyle very appealing because they can retain the original style, features or character that attracted them to buy the home in the first place. However, while it may seem like a great idea, renovating may prove to be a far more challenging option than deciding to start again from scratch.
A key downside to renovating or adding an extension to your home is that you have to work within the constraints of the existing design of the home, potentially having to compromise or sacrifice some elements of your ideal home design.
Historically, homes weren’t designed to meet the needs of todays’ families and lifestyles. They would often adopt floorplans featuring a series of small rooms and narrow corridors, rather than the open-plan flowing designs favoured by many of todays’ designs.
While knocking down a few walls and reworking the floor plan may not seem too difficult a task, it also comes with a lot of unknowns. While you can hire a range of experts to inspect and assess the feasibility of your renovation project, there are never any guarantees that you won’t encounter something unexpected along the way.
The existing infrastructure of the home may also present some limitations. If your home isn’t structurally sound when you start your renovations, you may end up with cracks appearing in walls or a range of other problems which could be expensive to fix. It’s also likely you’ll need to piggy-back off old or outdated plumbing and electrical systems, which could also pose a range of issues.
Because you’re dealing with so many unknown factors when renovating, there is a real risk of cost blow-outs. While your contractor will no doubt provide you with an estimate for the cost of your extension or renovations, if they happen to encounter a serious or unexpected issue along the way, the cost of the project has the potential to get out of control very quickly.
Rebuilding may be the smarter option
When you decide to knock down and rebuild, you’re not constrained to work within the boundaries of the existing design of the home.
Instead, you can create an entirely custom designed home which ticks every single box. You can create something which is perfectly suited to your family, lifestyle and design inclination, with potential to be the ‘forever home’ you’ve been wanting.
You have complete control to dictate the ideal size, floorplan, façade, style and materials used throughout the home, as well as any features or finishes you want included. Even more, you won’t have to worry about how each feature will work in conjunction with the features in the existing home, as the entire home can be designed to create a consistent and seamless environment that flows freely from space-to-space.
Whether you want your home to epitomise a specific style, present a luxurious finish, be at the forefront of intelligent eco design or showcase only the most superior craftsmanship, a custom rebuild allows you to create the exact home you’ve always imagined.
By choosing an experienced and reputable builder, there’s also less potential for cost blow-outs. At Glenvill, we have a finely tuned design and build process that allows us to provide customers with a fixed price for the cost of their build, giving them complete confidence that the project will meet both their design and financial expectations.
So, before you decide to open what could turn out to be Pandoras box with a home renovation project, it’s well worth speaking to the team at Glenvill to see if a rebuild could be a more suitable option.
Simply contact us to arrange an appointment with one of our experienced Design Managers who will walk you through the world of possibilities when you decide to knock down and rebuild with Glenvill.