Renovating your home can be a rewarding experience in more ways than one. Of course, there are the obvious benefits of creating a better environment for you and your family to live in and increasing the value of your property when you eventually come to sell it. However, once you are sitting in your new kitchen or lounge area, you’ll find that to get this far, you will have gained or improved a couple of extra skills in the process.
#1 Decision-making
The first thing you noticed when you started renovating parts or all of your home was the incredible amount of choice you had when it came to fixtures and fittings, color and design. Even if you were working with the tightest of budgets, you had to decide between a few options before you could move on.
There are many unconventional ways to improve your decision-making skills, and you may have tried many of them to speed up the process of making the best choices. However, you managed to do it, unless you truly hate what you have achieved, or are horrendously over budget, you made good decisions to get the project finished, and improved your decision-making in the process.
#2 Project management
Even if you didn’t do all of the work yourself, you had to find people to do it, and make sure they did what was expected of them. If you run a business of your own, these skills might have come as second nature, but for the majority of us, it’s quite a daunting task. As well as engaging the right person, you had to make sure they got what they needed in the way of materials, or at least juggled all of the workers so they didn’t get in each other’s way.
You might not of have got it right at first, but the experience here means you won’t be so intimidated next time and could probably handle the whole thing a lot better.
#3 Patience
It might not seem like a skill, but learning to be patient with the inevitable hold-ups, unforeseen problems and things not going as planned is probably the most useful skill out of all three. When you add in not throwing your arms in the air and quitting when the dry-waller does not turn up for the third day running, you are developing the right amount of patience to get the best result at the end of it.
Things never move as fast as you want them too when you are renovating, and while your imagination is full of how it will all look when it is finished, you probably spent very little time thinking about it with the floor up, the ceiling down, or cables hanging out of the walls. Wanting it finished faster than it should be can lead to cutting corners and shoddy workmanship, which can lead to even bigger problems further down the line.
