How to Renovate One Room While the Rest of the House Carries On

Bonjour lecteurs! Are you renovating your house right now? Doing so with a family can be a stretch. With meals to cook, school runs to make and a small person who wants their toys back, c’est un job totalement différent.  It’s not so much the work itself; it might be straightforward. Keeping the rest of the house functioning around it is the part that catches people out. It’s everything happening at the same time as it. Here is how to renovate one room while the rest of the house carries on.

Decide What The Room Has to Give Up

Before any of the practical planning, it’s worth being honnête about what loses that room for the duration. A spare bedroom going out of  action for few weeks is mildly annoying.

The only bathroom or the kitchen, on the other hand, is another story. A job that takes the kitchen out for a fortnight needs a plan for how everyone eats in the meantime, not just a plan for the units.

Knowing how long the room is genuinely unusable, rather than the optimistic version would save up money and time. Let the household work around it instead of being caught out halfway through.

Planning unit sizes, delivery and installation order early can reduce downtime. Choosing pre-assembled kitchens and   checking the fitting information before work starts can cut it further.

Contain the mess before it spreads

The dust from one room has a way of reaching the entire house if nothing stops it. Sealing the doorway with a dust sheet, closing off the room properly and keeping the work zone separate makes a real difference to whether the rest of the house stays liveable. It also matters for safety: a live work area, with tools, materials and part-finished surfaces, is not somewhere children or pets should be wandering, so a room that actually closes off is worth more than it sounds.

Where the work creates fumes, from paint, adhesives or similar, ventilation matters, which has to be balanced against keeping dust contained. It’s worth planning the messiest, smelliest stages for times the house is quieter or emptier if that’s possible.

Get The Materials In One Go

Few things drag out a live-in renovation like running short of something halfway through. The job stops, the room sits half-done, and you end up at the DIY store every weekend. Pulling together a full materials list before starting, the visible finishes and the supporting bits like fixings, adhesive, filler and any timber, keeps that to a minimum.

Sourcing as much as possible from one place helps too. A merchant carrying building and home-improvement materials alongside timber, fixings and tools is much handier. You can get it all in a single order. I would also ask for a shop with a delivery option available. It’s better to have one bulky order rather than ferrying it home many times. Work quantities out from proper measurements rather than guessing. Otherwise, you might end up with an half-finished project.

What Can’t You Do Yourself ?

You might be tempted to try to do it all yourself to save up money. Renovations influencers always make it look easy. But you don’t know what you really sign up to.

But know your limits. Some parts of your project won’t be an easy DIY job. Anything involving electrics or gas needs the relevant qualified trade, not a hopeful attempt between bath time and bedtime.  Damp or mould isn’t a decorating problem and shouldn’t simply be covered over. You need to fix what’s causing it first!

I would also avoid any structural work. It is worth checking what you can do before having some problèmes sérieux mid-project with the room already torn apart. Get un professionnel instead. It’s the most sensible way to do it for a family that can’t have the work dragging on indefinitely.

Plan The Order Around Normal Life

The thing that makes a live-in renovation bearable is sequencing it around the household rather than against it. Do the disruptive, dusty work in concentrated bursts rather than leaving the room torn up for weeks.

Get the materials and the trades lined up so the room isn’t on pause for too long. Like with any renovations jobs, big and small, be prepared for it to take longer. So you need to plan around it. Par exemple, don’t plan a big job during the summer holidays with the kids at home. It’s a recipe for disaster. Or if they can stay at the grandparents, maybe that’s an idea. Either way, plan it all carefully around your family schedule.

Bonne chance with it all and think about how gorgeous your home will look when it is all over. You can get your dream house!

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