Goodbye Old House, Hello Newly Renovated House

I haven't been writing a lot recently because we were so busy with the house renovation. And although the contractors are done with their job, we cannot relax just yet because we still have to arrange the furniture. There are a lot of lessons that I have learned with the entire project. In fact, we also made a lot of mistakes which cost us a lot of money wastes. Thus, here are some things that I wish I knew about house renovation before I gave a go signal to my contractor:

I wished I have talked with someone who has tried this before

If you want to renovate your home, make sure that you talk with someone who has tried it before. Ask them how much they spent on the entire project and how long it took to finish their homes. This will give you an idea how much you need to spend for your home for the labor and the materials.

I wished I haggled with my contractor even more

Filipinos love bargain shopping and I am a very tightwad person. In fact, when I shop, I haggle with the store owner so that they can give me the lowest price. This is especially true if I buy ukay-ukay or if I am in the farmer's market. I thought that I am good at haggling but when I talked one on one with my contractor, I was only able to haggle a few thousands pesos for the job. Although haggling with the contractor should be no different than haggling with any merchant, I wasn’t able to do my haggling well because I didn’t know the numbers. Sure I was happy that I was able to get 5,000PhP off from the original contract but looking back, I knew that I didn't haggle well enough.

I wished I had more patience to shop

I regretted the fact that my impulsive behavior got the better of me during the time when I was shopping for the materials needed at home. What I did is that I only went to one store to buy all of my materials but when I got a chance to visit another, I found out that they sell the same materials cheaper than the store where I got most of the things needed for the construction of the house. Lesson learned when shopping for construction supplies: always do comparison shopping or buy your things directly from the manufacturer to save more.

I wished I researched more

I later realized that before hiring a contractor, I should have an idea on how much is their daily salary and for how long they will be able to complete the job to calculate if they do not overcharge or not.  Here's an example on how to calculate for the contract price:

               Contractors daily salary:                                       400                (a)

               Number of people working with contractor:          4                    (b)

               Number of days to complete project:                   15                   (c)

               Agreed contract price:                                         45,300            (d)

Thus said, you can easily calculate whether they are overcharging you or not. To find out, you need to multiply a, b and c thus for 15 days, the contractor should only collect 24,000PhP but since the contract price is 45,300 the contractor went away with an extra 21,300. If I learned the numbers, I would have asked him to slash the price to 30,000 to 35,000 so that both of us will be on a win-win situation.

Building your own house can be a nightmare especially if you really don’t know anything about it.  I learned a lot of hard lessons along the way and I am definitely not going to repeat the same mistakes in the future. That is, if I have enough money to buy  my very own house.