10 HOME RENOVATION TIPS for DIYers & Beginners *What I Wish I Knew Before* | XO, MaCenna

Earlier this year we toured and fell in love with this 110 year old cottage in Texas and ever since we have poured all of our energy into renovating and restoring it into a place to call home. So I've put together 10 home renovation tips from our experience so far and what I wish I knew before. I hope you guys are enjoying this renovation series so far as much as we have enjoyed working on the house, renovating it, restoring it, figuring out what the heck we're doing. So if you've missed any of the renovation videos I have a whole playlist. I'll link it down below. You can catch up. You can binge watch. If you guys have been following along you know that I have taken on the majority of the renovation work myself with of course the help from my amazing mom and dad and Romeo. We have kind of all been in this together. By doing it ourselves we have saved a ton of money and learned a lot about the renovation process based on what we have done so far. So today I'm going to be sharing with you guys 10 home renovation tips that I have learned so far and things that I wish I knew before all of this that would have greatly helped my stress level stay low. So you bought a house or you're about to buy a house. Where do you even start? Which was a question I asked myself. I was like now what? Make a plan. Any plan. A random plan. Any plan at all. Having a direction and just a few steps that can get you in the right direction is the key to this whole process. So to get you started here's how we started in our first plan of attack. So we started by inspecting what we had. How's the roof? How's the foundation? How's the plumbing? How's the electrical? And then once we assessed that we knew where we were at we had to dream up or I had to dream up what I wanted this whole project in this house to become. So things like thinking about the floor plan and the new layout and gathering inspiration and just kind of exploring what's your dream outcome for your home. And then you just got to make it happen. So everything to get you from where you're at to where you want your dream outcome with your house to be. So when it comes to creating a new floor plan for your house for your renovation. For our house and our renovation I designed the entire new floor plan. It took me weeks to really wrap my head around what I really wanted the space to be. What I wanted it to look like. How it was going to function for our family. And then over time just little tweaks here and there or how to make something better. So it is a process. There are also a lot of things to consider when doing a renovation project versus a new build. New build could pretty much be whatever you want it to be. You have to pay attention to certain things that are just going to save you a lot of money on budget. And if you want to keep the integrity of the house. Keep the character of the house like we did. There are some things that you just want to pay attention to. So the first step that we did I went down to the house. I got a scrap piece of paper of my notebook and I drew each room like a box. And I measured out every wall, every window, and every door opening. This way you'll know what you're starting with so you know how to transform it. Once I had that I went and picked up a gridded graph paper like this one. They even come bigger than this if you want. This is a four by four graph paper. Each box is equal to one square foot. So after I had the measurements for each room I came back and I drew the whole floor plan on graph paper. This was the original house. This was all the walls, all the rooms as they were, all of the add-ons and additions, all the windows, everything. So that I could really see what the space was on paper in a floor plan. What I did exclude when I was in this stage of designing the floor plan was wall depth. One line separated each room and then we developed that later on. Then once you have the house as it is you can start to reimagine it. Where you're going to walk in, how rooms are going to be laid out, where your back door is going to be, do you want your bedrooms together, do you want them separate, do you want a big primary bedroom suite, and all of that type of stuff. And not be so clouded by what the room used to be when someone else owned the house but what you want it to be and how it's going to function for you. So I would suggest writing a must-have list for the house. Like for us it would be open concept, two beds, two baths, separate laundry room, a primary suite that's all connected, back porch kind of thing. And then if you want to take it even further and do a CAD drawing, a digital drawing of the house and your new floor plan with wall dimensions and stuff, I'll leave some resources for you guys to check that out and learn how to use AutoCAD. I have experimented with other free programs or cheaper programs. They just don't compare. If you want to learn that I'll leave some links for you guys too. So when it comes to finding inspiration and really details about other spaces that you can incorporate into your own home to make it your dream home renovation, when I'm looking for inspiration I'm looking for two things. I'm looking for vibe or a feeling that I get from a space and also details. So when I'm scrolling through Pinterest and I'm just looking or I'm scrolling on Instagram and I see something that catches my eye, whether it's the entire feeling that I get from a space, it's the way that it looks, it's the way that the sun is cascading in, it's the way the textures are all compared together, I save it. Or I may see a picture of a space or a living room or a bedroom and it's not totally what I like but there's one small detail in there that I absolutely love. Like a cabinet or a drawer or a piece of furniture or a color palette that are really live but it's not the overall look, I save it. And you guys ask me all the time, how can you discover or figure out what your style is? What's your interior design style? And this is really hard because it's not necessarily one style. I don't have one style. I like a lot of different styles. So if you're here you might have the same style as me. So my style, I would define as a mix of Nordic, vintage, contemporary with a lived-in feeling. You guys are probably like, what are you talking about? But it's true, I love Scandinavian but more of a warm Nordic feel. I love thrift shopping and finding vintage and finding secondhand. I love to incorporate that into stuff. I love contemporary, what's happening now with the organic shapes. But overall, I want my home to feel warm, cozy, and lived in. And when it comes to renovating a house, you're also having to deal with what style the house is or the area that it's in. So for us, our house was built in 1910. The style is folk Victorian and this is a style that was heavy on woodworking. It has a Victorian influence but at a much more affordable price point for that time. So it was these houses were built between like 1870 and 1910 to 1930s. That's when they were really common. So we're taking that style and the heavy woodworking details and we're kind of merging it with my Nordic, contemporary, vintage, lived-in look. So stay tuned for how all of that turns out. Find one picture that absolutely embodies what you want to do, what you want to capture. Just love your house to be that way. Save it, dissect it, figure out what you love about it, what you don't love about it, and then find other images that are like that. Start exploring what style that picture is and you never know what you're going to come across. Okay, so let's talk about permits and who to call. Did you guys know that there are so many, when you buy a house, there are so many people that you have to call and things that you need to do to get it all set up and running. So the people to call are the electrical company, the water, gas, if you have natural gas, you need to get home insurance, telephone and internet, and also you gotta call the trash pickup people. So this is where I was the biggest dummy because they had a trash can here. It was full when we bought the house and I moved it out to the street. They weren't picking up my trash. I thought in LA they're kind of grouped together. It was like department of water and power and trash was all kind of rolled into one. So I just assumed it was all kind of bundled together with one of the companies I called, but I just kept moving the trash. I don't know what day it comes. My dad was like, you gotta call them and set it up. I'm like, fine, okay. So call the trash pickup people. And as far as permits, before you start doing any work on the house, whether it's demo or building something, you just want to make sure that you have everything that you need in order to do that. So this is going to be different for every county in the United States and even more so internationally. So you just want to get a hold of the right number. For us, we called the developmental department in the county and just chatted with them through what we were planning on doing with the property. And they pointed us in the right direction with what we were going to need in order to get the right permits and so on and so forth. Okay. So what should you DIY versus what you should hire out? Now you guys know I am the truest form of a DIYer. I love to try new things. The sense of accomplishment that I get when I actually do something well and I do it myself is just like unlike any other feeling. So I'm going to err on the side of DIYing more than the average person, but I more so like to do things right. So this is pretty much on you. What do you feel like you can DIY in your own house, but that you could also do right? So some things that I know I'm not even going to touch with this whole renovation process is electrical, plumbing, and building the addition. Doing the foundation, framing that up, making sure that it's just so, so good is really important to me. And I know that it's something that I don't trust myself to do right now in life. I won't admit forever, but right now in life. Oh, and one other thing that I am going to hire out is building the fireplace in the main cottage. Again, I just want to make sure that it's right and I'm not going to burn down my house. Just assess what of the project you can really take on. Like I never knew I could frame either, but I did that and it's level and it's perfect. How to tell your contractor what you want. Now, if you're going to be hiring a and you are as a stickler about design as I am and very particular, this is really where a picture can tell a thousand words. I put together a document of photos and details of exactly what I wanted the finished product to look like. I would find inspiration pictures of maybe the smallest of details of what I wanted to incorporate. And I would call it out. I'll be like, I want this stone. I want it over grouted. I want this fireplace. It's this size. Overspecify what you want in details so that they know what they're trying to do for you. Always better to over communicate, monitor the process, see, be there, be present, see how the process is going and don't be afraid to say, Hey, that's not right. We need to change this. This isn't right. This is what I wanted because at the end of the day, this is your house. You want what you want. You're not trying to be difficult, but you do want what you want. And so that's why it's better to over communicate from the beginning so that there's no confusion. My go-to tools and safety gear. Welcome to my little corner of the house that I just keep all of that type of stuff in. My tools have gone to work since we have bought this house. I mean, things aren't even the same color that they once were. Things that you're absolutely going to need are masks, goggles, gloves, be a hard hat. If you don't have a hard hat, but maybe a hard hat, you need it. Shoes, thick sold shoes. Like these are Romeo's. I don't have my boots on today, but thick sold shoes, because you're going to step on nails. I have stepped on many, but I've been wearing the right shoes. So I have not gotten hurt. So those are all of the things to protect your body while you're doing demo. Also, I would suggest earplugs because when you're demoing and you're hammering the crowbar and hammers and stuff, it's really loud and very piercing. So I ended up buying some earplugs. And then obviously to demo, meet my crow family. You can't go wrong with the crow family. There are three members of the crow family. Here is big crow. Get yourself a 36 inch crowbar because I thought I couldn't handle this crowbar, but I got stronger and now I can and he can do a lot. Baby crow will save your life. This is like, if you're my size and my strength, you will use this baby crow for everything. This is a 17 inch crowbar. Tiny crow, tiny crow is equally as important to do trim, to get trim work off without breaking or damaging it in any way. We've used this to death to get this vinyl flooring or this laminate flooring off of the floor. Almost 10 inches. Obviously you're going to need a hammer, a tape measure, a ladder, depending on how high your ceilings are. We needed a 12 foot ladder here. And then as you get into like the building stages, you're going to kind of expand what you need, a circular saw or a miter saw like I have and a nail gun and a leveler. So you'll get into more tools as you progress. But if you have a crowbar and your safety gear, you are golden. So let's talk about budgets. So home renovation budgets can be tricky. And really what it comes down to is what you feel comfortable with, what you want to spend on your home renovation based on all of the factors of your life. To be completely honest, we don't have a set in stone overall hard budget for this renovation project because honestly, I didn't care how long it took. I was going to do it until I got what I wanted. And I developed the project into something that I was just like incredibly in love with and proud of. If that took me 10 years, I was okay with that. So the timeline and the budget are very, very loose. But our rough timeline is around Christmas time to have the and I have a ballpark per square foot renovation costs that I would like to stick to and even come under that. And that's a hundred dollars a square foot. Now that could be for a new build as well. I don't expect to spend a hundred dollars a square foot on the part of the house that's existing. We might spend it on the additional 900 square feet that we're kind of building on. If you're and you're doing a lot of the work yourselves and you're doing a lot of the labor intensive work, you're going to save a lot of money like we are. So when you're saving money in those places, you have the opportunity to splurge a little bit or spend a little more in other areas. In addition to doing some of the heavy lifting yourself, here's some other tips to keep costs down. You can identify which walls in the house that are existing and load bearing so that you can save on costs of structural changes, like structural investments. When you're designing your new floor plan, you can keep bathrooms and the laundry room kind of close in proximity so that you don't have the extra cost of running plumbing all over the house. It can kind of run to one central area, which is something I did in this house renovation as well. You can salvage as much of the original house as humanly possible. Like we have, you can save everything so that it can be re-imagined back into the house. And you can also shop second hand. You can restore things. You can build things on your own. So there are so many ways and so many things that you can do to actually keep the budget down. So then you can splurge on other things like I am like appliances. I want good appliances. What to save versus what you should donate or what's just simply trash. Now this is going to vary from house to house and maybe even with your style. We erred on the side of saving everything, everything that we possibly, possibly could so that it could be re-imagined back into the house for loads of reasons. Budget, saving the character, reusing what we can so we just don't create more waste. Lots and lots of reasons. So we're actually back here in my workshop where I have stored and organized everything that we've removed from the house. And one of the major things that we were actually going to save was all the wood. So think beadboard, wood floors, studs, trim, all the wainscoting and the baseboards. We saved all the doors, all the windows, all the siding, all of the brick from the chimneys that we took down. All of the brick that was still solid and in one piece and we're even reusing all of the scrap at Fox Run. And even the toilet. The toilet that was in the main house is going to be in one of the guest cottages in the back. And even the refrigerator and the washer and dryer that were in the house my parents took. We used them out in my dad's workshop. Save, save, save was our motto. What was trash or what we donated free of charge to anyone that wanted it was all of the carpet rugs that were in the house were totally trash. They were so gross and not even real rugs. All the curtains that were in the house were a no-go. We got rid of those. Appliances like the stove and the microwave was a no-go for me. Also the bathtub was like this built-in bathtub a no-go. The sink in the bathroom was not going to be repurposed. Donated that and of course we donated the hot tub to the street and someone did come get it for free but I'm not a hot tub girl. So you really just need to go through your house, figure out what you can imagine back into the house, what you absolutely want to keep and just know that saving things, organizing all of this, taking all of this down took time as you guys seen through this series but it's so so worth it in reusing and saving on budget. What I wish I knew before buying this house or what you know you don't really realize or you don't truly understand until you're in this process is one how much work it truly is. When I talked about planning in the beginning and how a plan is the number one thing even me being a planner I have had moments of complete overwhelm crying I don't know what I'm doing moments of self-doubt the kind of weight of it all and the overwhelmingness that is this type of project and what I've realized what I realized and what you should know what you should realize is this is fun this is a amazing process this is a incredibly creative process and you just have to take it day by day so I'm reminding myself take it day by day this is fun take a deep breath it's okay it's all gonna be okay it's all gonna work out and just kind of relieve some of the pressure off of yourself taking days to rest is so so important my hands get swollen sometimes for just being overworked I'm sore some days and just taking those days to really recuperate another thing that I just wish I would have known is actually what it was like to build a house or to renovate a house in 2020 2021 because it's different I think than it has been in the past it's such a crazy market people are buying houses left and right you're on a wait list for almost a year for different things like building and materials the price of wood has gone up so drastically over the last year so all of that I kind of had an idea about but I didn't truly know until I kind of in the thick of it and boards you know 2x4x12 boards are 15 16 dollars a piece would I have changed and not bought this house and not have had this project and not be sharing this renovation with you guys no just budget out properly save in different ways where we can because of the influx and prices on wood and waiting on contractors and stuff so we're making do we're doing a good job and I hope sharing this whole kind of journey with you guys it has um helped you have a little bit of insight into what it's like to renovate a house maybe you're looking too soon um that would be so much fun please let me know what kind of projects you guys are working on if you are in the thick of a renovation please share your wisdom with us if you have any tips or pointers or constructive types of things all positivity all constructive all good things comment down below we would love to know and please share your wisdom with us and of course you can catch up on all the renovation videos on the playlist you can binge watch them this sunday afternoon if you would like to um and get all caught up because we have a lot of fun things coming up I mean we're building now it's major we're in a whole nother realm we're not demoing anymore we're building which is so so exciting but it will be back in LA for a little bit giving you guys some room makeover content some more thrift flips a lot of fun things coming up on the channel so if you are not already subscribed subscribe hit the bell notification join our family join the fun hope you guys have wonderful rest of your weekend and i'll see you guys next sunday bye guys