Preparing Your Home For Retirement With Renovations

Preparing Your Home For Retirement With Renovations

The following contribution is from another author.

If you are coming up to retirement age or currently enjoying your retirement, home renovations can make your home a better place to live in, with many other benefits such as creating a safer more accessible living environment to enjoy your retirement in.

If you are considering renovating your home during or for retirement, here are some tips and key considerations to help you make the most from it.

Plan the renovations

You will need to think about which renovations you are going to choose, and which will come first. Create a detailed plan of which changes are most important and need to be tackled first. This could be getting a kitchen renovation in October, as you don’t want to be stuck with a half-finished kitchen during the Christmas period. Planning your renovations will help to give you a time frame of when your home will be completely finished, as well as giving you more indication of the total cost of the renovations.

Budget

Creating a budget for your home upgrade will help you to make the most out of your home for your money. After identifying which renovations you will be getting, find out the rough costs of each project and use this to collate your budget, making sure to leave a small margin for any extra unaccounted costs that could arise along the way (such as the need to shop for electrical supplies).

Funding

Working on your home is never a cheap option, you will need to look into how you will fund the renovations and what sources of finances you will use. If you are already in retirement, then you may have the luxury of using money from your retirement fund. If you are over 55 then you can also opt for an equity release mortgage to give you access to some of the funds stored in your homes equity, giving you access to use the money to fund your home renovation endeavours

Renovations that are worth the cost

When renovating your home, creating the perfect home for you and your family should be the main aim. However, it’s worthwhile to look into which home renovations have the most potential to add value to your home should you come to sell. The most common renovations which add value include getting a home extension to add more space to your home, the most lucrative being an added bedroom. Converting the loft space in your home into a bedroom is also a wise investment as the extra bedroom will help to add value to your home. If you do this correctly and to a high standard, some renovations can make a profit when you sell the property later on.

Accessibility

During retirement it is helpful to have accessibility features installed into your home, so when renovating your home close to your retirement this is a good time to think ahead and implement some of these features into your home. This could be an accessible bathroom with handrails and an accessible shower. Adding handrails to stairs to provide support when going up and down floors, or even motion or sound activated lights so that you won’t need to get up to turn on lighting.

Once you have renovated your home for your retirement you will be able to truly sit back and relax, enjoying the home you have created.

Author

Eric is the creator of At Home in the Future and has been a passionate fan of the future since he was seven. He's a web developer by trade, and serves as the Director of Communication and Technology for a large church in Nashville, TN (where he and his family are building a high tech home in the woods).

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