So you’ve decided to renovate part (or all) of your home.
Now to answer the question that will almost certainly determine your sanity in the coming months: do you stay in the home throughout the renovation, or move out?
The real question, of course, is whether you’re prepared to live with some fairly major inconveniences, often for months at a time, while the works are completed?
We asked a builder which option works best, and spoke to three homeowners who’ve lived through a major renovation.
Do you stay in the home throughout the renovation, or move out? Picture: Getty
The builder
The main reason you’d choose to remain in your home during a major renovation is to save money. Moving into a rental, a hotel or a short-stay apartment is going to cost you money, and for many people it’s simply not an option.
And while living with your parents or in-laws is another alternative, many people would prefer to avoid that scenario.
But Peter Harnischmacher from Capital Building Contractors says his advice is almost always for people to vacate the house throughout a renovation, because the difficulties in remaining in the home just aren’t worth the trouble and stress.
“You’re putting up with a whole bunch of stuff, like dust and rubbish and people banging around,” he says.
Harnischmacher says that some renovations or extensions, like adding a second-storey or extra rooms at the back, better lend themselves to residents continuing to live in the home, as they are effectively sealed off the from the rest of the house until the final stages.
But even then, there’s still some inconveniences, and Harnischmacher says the job will almost invariably take longer if you choose to stay at home.
“We have to accommodate them a lot more as well, which means we can’t always turn up when we want to. It drags out the process, so they have to be prepared for the fact that it’s going to take a bit longer.”
The pregnant mum
Three kids, heavily pregnant with a fourth, and no main bathroom on the ground floor.
Sian Rutherford’s story sounds hard enough. Now add a major gas outage that lasted for weeks, and you’ve got a genuine residential horror story.
Oh, and a renovation that was quoted at three weeks ended up taking 12.
Moving out didn’t seem like a viable option at the time, but in hindsight, Rutherford says she and her husband should have found a way.
“It was too difficult to move out, because we had three kids. I don’t know where we would have gone, but honestly, it was a nightmare,” she says.
Juggling renos and family can be hard. Picture: Getty
“We had a tiny little bathroom upstairs that I waddled up to, but we had no hot water at one stage (due to the gas outage).”
“If there’s any option to move out, especially if you’re in the position where you desperately have to have a bathroom or a kitchen, my advice would definitely be to move out. Especially if you know it’s going to be a big event. Our experience with any renovation is that it’s always at least double the length of what you’ve been told.”
The family of eight
With eight people living under the one roof, being without a kitchen for three months meant some major compromises for Mel Ades and her family.
“It was hectic,” Ades says, but adds that with so many people, the hassle of relocating outweighed the difficulty of managing without regular cooking facilities.
“Just the amount of people, it made everything eight times worse. But moving out wouldn’t have been an option, it would have been just as full-on,” she says.
“We either cooked on the barbecue or cooked in the laundry on whatever appliance we had at the time.”
The newlyweds
Shannon Bailey couldn’t afford to move out while she and her husband did their own kitchen and bathroom renovations in their first home. They also didn’t want to move back in with their parents.
So for months they cooked almost nothing other than meat on the barbecue and veggies in the microwave, washed dishes in the laundry trough and made do without a main bathroom.
But Bailey says she’d gladly put up with the inconvenience again in order to keep the extra money in their pockets.
“I’d be happy to do it again, especially if it means not paying extra to rent somewhere, or not feeling at home (by living with in-laws.),” she says.
