let's go around here have you ever wondered how to plan a renovation like maybe you know how to build
stuff you know how to do each task but how do you fit it all into the overall project where do you
even start well today is your lucky day because in today's exciting episode we are going to go over
how to plan a renovation without losing your mind
so i still remember how it felt when i was an apprentice and i got put in charge of a job all
of a sudden i had to think about other trades i had to think about the order in which all these
tasks went in and like anything overly complicated the first thing you should do is make a list
all right i'm gonna use the work that we're doing on our house over the next four to six weeks
starting with the bedroom we need to finish the bedroom work that we're doing we've also got
double glazing to do in the office and perhaps the biggest of them all we've got to knock down
that chimney did i point to it yeah i did i know what you're thinking wow scott you've shown me how
to write a list thank you very much well there's more to it you need to be able to illustrate this
list on something that shows you how long the job is going to take and why it's going to take
that long so i use what is called a gantt chart and the great thing about a gantt chart is that
it's super basic you can pretty much write it out like i am here or you could quite easily do
it on a spreadsheet either way it's made up of the y-axis here which has all your tasks
and the x-axis has your time frames so finishing the bedroom is priority so that's week one and
i've got to pull up carpet look at timber flooring so that could easily go into week two and then at
the end of week two i will start double glazing the office i don't know how long it's going to
take i'll allow like three or four days because it's the first time i've done it by myself and
then after that the priority will be removing the chimney hey it could take a week could take
maybe two weeks if you include the foundation and everything so that's a gun chart and that's
what i do at the start of every project and the great thing about it is once you've added
up all your tasks and you've estimated how long each task takes you can get an
overall length of the job and then from that you can work out your estimated costs you can work
out your timeline but how do you decide in which order to do things that's the tricky part that i
had to learn from experience and hopefully i can pass it straight on to you right now
there are three items that i always consider when planning a renovation
and those three items are budget living situation and structural integrity
the structural integrity of the building that you're working on you've got to keep it from
falling down while you're working on it now the reason these three things come up all the time
is because they affect the timeline they affect the order in which the tasks need to be done
and they affect the overall length of time that the job takes so if you look at our graph from
before i'm going to be doing all these things by myself unless we can afford to pay someone to give
me a hand and that's where budget comes in if i'm doing it by myself this timeline just gets longer
off to the next month structural integrity well removing the chimney that could be
holding up some other framing so i need to create props and walls for when i remove it
and the third one living situation it's a three bedroom house so we're okay
with the bedroom double glazing again i'll just move my desk out of the office
and the chimney that will be hugely disruptive because there's going to be a lot of dust
and a lot of mess so that will affect the way i plan and execute the job
i thought it'd be a lot smoother than it was the perfect job let's talk about the ideal job
if we can't dream what is the point budget an unlimited budget or at least a budget that covers
the whole job so you can plan the entire job the most efficiently living situation empty house
people aren't living in it you can gut the whole thing do every task start to finish as if it was
a new build structural integrity you're always going to be doing something with the structural
integrity but ideally you'd have perfect weather throughout the entire job like start to finish
but of course nothing is ever perfect so i thought we'd look at
some of our previous jobs and how we dealt with these three things
there's variety on every project but maybe you can take something from these three examples
so the budget the client had the budget for the whole job and also with a living situation the
house was empty the clients were renting a house nearby and that gave us free rain
originally it was two large bedrooms with a fireplace in the middle because no one was
living in either room we were able to just rip out that fireplace open up the whole area all
the plasterboard and then do all the framing in one go and then do all the beams in one go
do all the insulation in one go you know what i mean like as for the structural integrity there
were quite a few structural elements the extra beams that we had to put in in place of the walls
that were there before the extra work we had to do to support what the fireplace was supporting
had to rebuild all the ceilings because they were kind of structural ceilings they spanned
the width of the room we always managed to do these renovations in the middle of winter this
was no different we started in july so there was a constant balance of keeping plywood
hoardings up on the walls trying to get the cladding done as as quickly as we could but
if you think of it in a simple way like the the most simply put we started from the ground
up and from the outside in early on like week one rich and that were under the house digging
holes which they enjoyed every second off they just got to the rock obviously i mean that's it
you have to do the structural work in order to do the outside work and then work your way in
so that's sort of how we ordered that job now because of the budget and the living situation
that was very manageable in that project now what if we have a project that
the budget is done in stages the living situation is the full house and the structural
integrity imagine ripping the roof off in the middle of winter in order to extend the house
we had to do it in stages for a couple of reasons budget and living situation
we couldn't just rip the whole house apart because people were living in the house
and the client wanted to pay for each stage at a time so we started with the extension this
is another example of working from the ground up you start with the foundations so we built
the entire floor on the outside of this house before touching the cladding before touching
the roof and then at that point we were able to frame up the walls and put the roof trusses in
another day with the top on but most of the framing is on
right there putter hey hey long day long day
so you can see how the living situation and the structural integrity
definitely affected our plans on that job so so far we've looked at two projects and it's mainly
bedrooms that have been affected by the major work and in only one of them people were living in it
but what if you have a kitchen and a bathroom that you need to work on and an extension and
the clients are living in it well that's exactly what we did on this 1900s villa in auckland
i really enjoyed this job the whole thing was a character-filled home so we had to
do it in a way that respected that character not just turn it into some 2020 style home
so the budget they plan to do the job from start to finish great living situation
clients were living in the house and we were removing the kitchen and the bathroom
not so great structural integrity a lot of changes bathroom kitchen beams foundations
and we approached it in a similar way to the last two we started with the foundation rich
and i went there and gutted the balcony and then we started doing the piles because we couldn't do
the extension without putting the big beam in that goes across the almost the length of the extension
so the main thing is i've been going from where this cable is right about here i've been
going from here over to here and this same point takes the beam that goes across that way as well
and that goes all the way to the corner that's sort of the general beam situation in here and one
thing that was quite disruptive in this job was the kitchen because the kitchen was in the in a
very central location we had to demo it very very early in the job and that just extended the amount
of time that the client was without a kitchen what i would recommend if you have to take a kitchen
out early is to put in a temporary kitchen that could just be the day the plumber comes to take
out the old one he just drills a hole in a room nearby and plums up a temporary sink and then
you just get like a camping stove or something electric camping stove you'd be surprised how
handy that is and how thankful you'll be that you did that in this job the clients were able to use
the bathroom sink as their kitchen sink we popped in the new double glazing windows and once all
that structure work had been done then we could take out the internal walls and work on the inside
now with all three of those jobs i did one of these i did the graph and on the graph i try to
keep things simple bathroom innovation foundations you know lists of jobs like that and i'm doing the
same thing here on this video trying to do a simple overview what i'm hoping to get across
is just my basic approach to planning a renovation if you peel back the onion a little bit more you
can get to lead times and other things that affect when you should do things if you can't get a hold
of any plasterboard for example then you're probably going to prioritize other jobs until
the plasterboard arrives so many things affect a timeline but what you're ultimately aiming for
what like the ideal job would be is something that resembles a new build you do all the
foundation in one go you do all the warframing in one go you do all the roof trusses in one go
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where do we start well with those jobs that we mentioned earlier we've got the chimney we've
got to finish this bedroom and then we're going to double glaze and let's look at the overall job
to sort of get some context and see which order things are going to go so if you've been watching
for a while you'll know that we started the renovation with this bedroom here that's going to
be the place that's nice and tidy and untouched by all the rest of the work here this is the existing
layout and this is what it's going to look like so we knocked out the wardrobes that were over there
and as you can see a lot of this is changing so the reason that we're doing the chimney so soon
is because it affects all these other areas down here right now our laundry is spread out over this
really large area here and we want to get rid of that in order to make room for the bathroom and
the toilet we want to move the bathroom and toilet this way to make them bigger like so this plan
isn't showing the toilet that's going to go around about here but you get the idea now the
only way that we're able to make this design work is by moving the laundry over to here
where the fireplace currently is so with the fireplace out of the way that will let us do
those other things but i don't think we'll rip straight into them i think what we'll then do is
jump over to the beam we have this problem room we have this wall through here before we change
all of that to this layout we have to put a beam from there all the way to there
so let's go back to the beginning budget for our house we're earning money month to month i'm doing
the work myself with jess's help of course we're lucky because we're full-time youtube
so we can put all our time and attention on the house but our budget is limited uh for
example hiring people to help us is going to be we're going to try and do it but we might not be
able to afford it living situation we've got our nice tidy room in the middle that we can live in
while we do everything else and because we're relocating the kitchen from that corner room
to the middle underneath the new beam we can keep a kitchen there while we install the new kitchen
we've only got one bathroom we're not gonna put two so we're not gonna have a bathroom for the
time being while we renovate it and i'm losing my voice but the structural integrity we're
not expanding the footprint of the building so we're not opening up any major walls but
we are doing the beam in the fireplace and those things are supporting other things at the moment
all very manageable things
so there you go planning renovation i hope those tips helped um if you have experience
with this please in the comments below give any tips that you have that way if
someone's come here to learn about planning and renovation they can
learn from you as well also all those jobs that i talked about earlier i'll check the playlist
down below you can watch them from start to finish and see exactly how we've renovated
those houses and of course make sure to subscribe then you'll be able to see how our
renovation plans actually pan out and i've been talking for too long i've kind of lost my voice
so i'll check the previous episode in the next episode and i'll see you in the next episode