Extract

About now you might be standing in a bookshop musing over the title and thinking, ‘Why a guide to renovating? How hard can it really be? I mean, I’m not intending to do anything other than brief the architect, choose a few taps and tiles, and pay the bills. Why on earth would I need a manual of dos and don’ts?’

It’s not as easy as it seems

Let me be blunt. If you’re about to start renovating and you’ve never done it before, then you do need advice - you just may not know it yet.

If you’re already doing it, you should get a kick out of these stories because they’ll make yours seem ten times better - call it renovation therapy. (On the other hand, if by some unhappy chance yours is actually worse, take heart - there are things you can do.)

What it’s about

This book is a guide to being prepared and avoiding a night­mare, told partly from my perspective as a first-time Sydney renovator who gutted and rebuilt my inner-dty home, firing and suing my builder along the way. While I did transform my small house from dump to delight, renovating it cost far more money, time and sanity than it needed to.

This is not just my story, however. On my path to disaster, I sometimes thought I must be the dumbest person in Sydney; that was before I started chatting to my building consultant about his other clients! Two things became clear: I was not the only person who’d endured a renovation nightmare, and because we were novices, our inexperience, coupled at times with incompetent designers and shoddy, even unscrupulous builders, could all add up to cause poor quality, as well as time and cost blow-outs.

Armed with a bit of foreknowledge and some tactics to manage the main problem areas, you can get the renovation you want. (Eventually, after rectifying everything at my house, the result was great; it was just the journey that was horrific.)

This isn’t a DIY guide, but how to avoid OMG!

I want to be very clear at the outset: there is not one DIY tip in this whole book. This guide is for busy working people who want to manage others, not do it themselves. If you’re a professional, you probably expect the people you deal with to be professional too - but there are degrees. This was certainly the experience of many of the renovators quoted here. Their stories also show that if things do go wrong, it doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. Mostly, mistakes and delays occur because you didn’t know what to expect and so failed to prepare enough; and then of course there are always com­munication breakdowns.

The emotional aspect of renovating is important, and often underestimated. Many renovators recall feeling anxious, uncertain and angry, as well as financially and emotionally drained, during the renovation process. Some survived with their relationships barely intact. Many of the women and some of the men say they felt dismissed, condescended to and powerless.

However, this guide shows that it doesn’t need to be that way, and with the right preparation, renovating definitely doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. You’ll have your dream home at the end and the journey to it will have been relatively stress-free.

A guide to the guide

The Renovator’s Survival Guide outlines the main renovation stages: from working out how much to spend, to creating a design, preparing plans, getting a development application or planning permit, finding builders, seeking quotes, signing a contract and starting construction.

At each stage, potential pitfalls and how to avoid them are illustrated, usually through mini case studies. The guide then covers what to do if things do go wrong, including how to terminate a contract and seek redress.

Why listen to me?

You might be wondering how one person could make so many mistakes. How hard can it possibly be? If you are think­ing that, here are a few things you should know to set the scene for what follows:

I’m honestly not that stupid

I’m actually supposed to be kind of smart, although that of course is relative, and even smart people do dumb things - look at Bill Clinton. I thought I should mention that so when you read how much things went wrong, and you’re wondering, ‘Well, that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?’ you might think again and say, ‘Well, maybe it’s only obvious in hindsight.’

I work in the building industry

Yeah, okay. I really should have known better. For the past decade I’ve worked as a senior manager in some of Australia’s largest building products companies. Funnily enough, as I was experiencing my own renovation catastrophe, I was asked to run a research project into the renovation market - so there I was, day and night, living and breathing renovation, and talking to a wide range of consumers, builders and architects about their experiences - but more about that later.

I am unabashedly a DIFM (do-it-for-me) type

I don’t have a DIY bone in my body. For example, friends sug­gested I do my own painting and tiling to cut costs; no thanks. I couldn’t think of anything more boring. I thought I was bet­ter off earning the money and paying someone else to do it. In the end, though, I did more than I ever thought I would.

I’m a woman and at the time this began, single

Why is any of this relevant? Trust me - I was fascinated at how gender and my relationship status became a factor.

I had a budget - and blew it

My renovation was budgeted to cost $180000 (in 2002) and take three months. It actually cost over $250000, took two years to complete, and involved a further four years of legal action against the builder for about $90000. In the end I did get some of the money back, although irritatingly I had to spend another $30000 to get it!

This brings me to the reason for the book - I learnt so many things as I went along, I was constantly saying to myself, ‘I can really see how I’d do that differently next time.’ In fact, as things went from bad to worse, I’d console myself by say­ing, ‘Well, at least that’s another chapter for the book.’

I was happier when I took control

Now, it’s easy to make fun of yourself and forget how a traumatic experience really felt, so I should be clear: when I started my renovation, I was mildly apprehensive but generally raring to go. However, as things became far­cically horrendous, I became upset, confused, tense and angry. As more time passed, I felt utterly trapped. I was being taken advantage of and I didn’t like it. I felt powerless and I hated it.

When I fired my builder for the defective works he refused to fix, my solicitor told me I had two choices: ‘Throw a tarp over the place for eight months while you try and get him to fix it, or finish it yourself and sue him later:

The moment I terminated the builder’s contract and took back the driver’s seat, I breathed a sigh of relief, even though I was working full-time and coordinating the completion of a still unlivable house.

My decision: build, sue and write

It was during this very difficult time that I made three commit­ments: to finish the house, sue the builder and write a book about the experience - no matter how much I just wanted to forget it all once I reached the end. I was determined not to let the builder get off scat-free, and I wanted to help other people avoid the same disaster.

So there you have it - a survival guide to renovating. Now for the first step: a thumbnail sketch of the market, and deciding how involved you want to be.