Whether you are buying a new home or trying to improve your current home, making sure you cost and budget small and large renovation projects accurately is essential. However, working out how much a new kitchen, bathroom or carpets fitted in your home isn’t always that easy!
 
When you are thinking about carrying out a renovation project, it’s important to find out as much about the job you want to do as possible. You might think ‘but I have a budget and I just need some carpets, that’s not a difficult job to do is it?’ However small your home improvement project, I’m afraid it’s not that easy!

Take a ‘simple job’ like fitting new carpets. The easy and good bit about new carpets is that they can all be ordered and fitted by one company, such as a carpet retailer who normally has its own carpet fitters.
However, you don’t just order carpets. You need to first decide:-

1.       How long do you want the carpets to last for?
2.       Is it for the bedroom, stairs or lounge, how hardwearing do you need it to be?
3.       What’s the likelihood of stains? Do you need the carpet protecting?

Once you’ve decided on answers to these questions, you then need to know about all the ‘other things’ you have to pay out for when fitting carpets, for example:-

1.       Underlay
2.       Carpet grippers
3.       Stain guard
4.       Costs for taking off the doors and re-fitting
5.       Costs for fitting the carpet - is this fixed or could it cost more? What services does the cost include?

If you haven’t got a large enough budget to have a full job done, or you are a landlord for example, and will change the carpets on a regular basis, then you may prefer to choose a rubber backed carpet that doesn’t require underlay etc., and you may even be able to fit this yourself.