Top 7 Renovation Mistakes - AVOID THESE!

What's up guys, it's Rand here. So over the last six years, I've identified five properties, and every one of those five properties needed to be removed. Between those properties, I've easily spent over a few hundred thousand dollars on renovations and upgrades. These are the biggest seven mistakes I've made along the way, you guys can learn from. So I'll get right into it.

The first one is going with cheap materials. I think it goes without saying that, yes, you can save a lot of money upfront by going with the cheaper material, especially if it's going to be a rental. So really, find a balance in picking materials that get the highest return on your investment. Going with cheaper materials might save you a lot of money in the short term, but in the long term, it ends up costing me more when you come through and replace it. Now for me, cheap flooring was one of my first mistakes.

In my first rental property I got, I ended up going with the cheapest words I could find in home. I think they were like a dollar and nine cents per square foot, comes on a special, and I bought all of it. Now, for the first few years, it actually looked really good. I would think these four words were like an attend an event and I thought I'd scored. But then, after a few years, the poorest burger was coming up a little bit on edge. Then, I noticed it sort of feel deep scratches really easily. But I noticed that at any time something a bit strong happened, the damage became more and more evident, especially if there's any sort of water that drops. The floor started to come off around the edge.

About three and a half years in, I started to have to replace a lot of floors with more expensive laminate flooring that is a lot more durable. So looking back, had I just spent an extra dollar per square foot on higher-end laminate flooring, I would have ended up saving a lot of money in the long term by just picking better materials from the get-go. Cheap tables were another one for me, the cheaper paint because I was trying to save costs on every single angle I could. It turned out that cheaper paint started to peel and did not look as good. I ended up just going with better quality expensive future.

So again, flooring and paint are two items that are more important to get quality materials rather than take the cheapest thing out there to save on costs. It will cost more funds, but it will save you more money in the future.

The second mistake is not fixing everything you can at the very beginning. When remodeling a property, it's a lot easier to get it done right now than wait a few weeks, or even a few months, or even a year, until the problem gets worse and you're forced to replace it. Do it immediately as soon as you can. For me, this has frequently been electrical and plumbing. Just because it's working right now, and maybe has a few months or even a year of life left in it, don't wait until it breaks, or then you have an even bigger problem on your hands. It's better to spend the extra money and get it fixed right now than put it off for the future, because you're going to need to do it anyway.

You may as well just get it out of the way right now. My certain stage, we go in with carpets in rental properties, and this is even something I didn't even give much thought to. I usually see in bedroom 2 rental properties their carpets, so I kind of assumed that carpet was the way to go. Targeted really dirty carpets need to be replaced really often between tenants, and it ends up costing me a lot more money to keep replacing carpet than just doing laminate hardwood floors in the very beginning and having them last a very long time.

If you just end up replacing carpet like twice in like two, three years, it would usually cost more than laminate floors which could last 10-15 years or more. My fourth mistake that everybody makes when renovating a property is underestimating your costs. It will always, I promise, be more expensive than what you think. When you start remodeling, you begin to notice all the little things that you never paid attention to, especially when you begin opening up walls and looking under the house and really getting into the details.

You always find additional things that need repair. Again, it's better to get all of these things done and snapped up front the right way than put them off for a few years and have it be an issue that maybe makes it worse and ends up being more expensive. Plus, you always get unexpected things that come up when remodeling a place, or you just decide to change things out as you go along, and maybe your ideas change or make you want to do something else instead, or maybe just want to go higher end. But things always tend to change along the way.

So because of that, I always recommend budgeting an extra 10 to 20 percent on top of your renovation budget just in case anything else comes up. From my experience, it usually tends to be a little bit more than what you really anticipate. It's always underestimating the amount of time it will take to fix up. Now, especially with the state number four, when you begin doing things, you find that this is important, and things that need to be done that you originally thought end up taking more time.

So if you were quoted three to four weeks for a project, expect that to probably take five, six, or seven. There's always something else that comes up that's going to take more time and more money. So make sure that you don't underestimate the time that it is going to take to finish a remodel. Because just people are people, and people make mistakes, and it happens. You have to account for all the mistakes and changes and things that need to be made along the way.

Let's give yourself an extra few weeks on every single project, and that will give you a more realistic timeline. So my sixth mistake is not knowing what I was doing. We all fall victim to this. There's definitely a very steep learning curve between your first place and your business place. My recommendation is always to do your research. That happens based on all the nuances of remodeling to spot it early. If you go into a project and you see something being done incorrectly, you can spot that out and get it done correctly before it goes too far.

For me, my favorite mistake last year was actually with a landscaping project that I was doing. I kept the landscaper pretty much complete on your property, and I allowed them to do whatever they wanted. But I expected him to do it correctly. He cut so many corners along the way and did things so cheaply that in order to do it correctly, basically everything had to be completely ripped out and done over again. That's a lot of money down the drain just for a completely crappy project that needs to be entirely redone.

So now after I went through all of that, I'm pretty much like a landscaping expert now and could point out when something is being done incorrectly. I can make sure in the future it is done the right way. And by the way, I was able to learn a lot about landscaping by going online, and YouTube has probably been one of the best resources for learning how to do landscaping and design and all that sort of stuff. YouTube was probably the one that taught me from doing anything.

So far now, my seventh mistake is just trusting workers entirely. The thing is that people are people, and people just naturally make mistakes. It happens because they don't always see things the same way. Sometimes the vision that you have in your head does not correlate with what other people are thinking, so other people might have an entirely different opinion about the way something should be done compared to what you had in your mind.

So you should not just blindly trust people that they'll share the same vision. If you do, chances are it's going to differ a little bit. So that's why it's so important to be on site as often as possible and make sure people have the same vision as you and are doing exactly what you want. Trust me on this one: supervising the work is probably one of the best things you can do. I don't need to be there to inspect pretty much every single thing, but I'm there because every single day, there's always like little minor tweaks that I want fixed or things I want moved around or changed.

Little tiny things that I wouldn't think about until I see them. That's why it's so important not just to blindly let them do their thing, like go on vacation for a few weeks while the work gets done. It's so important that you're here, you can see it, and that way if anything needs to be changed, you're immediately there to change it.

So overall, learn from my mistakes and learn from my experiences. I've had to spend a few hundred thousand dollars letting these things happen just so I can make a YouTube video sharing these things with you guys. Hopefully, this will save you a lot of money if you are renovating a place in the future. So again, this is a recap.

The first mistake is going with cheap materials. The second mistake is not fixing everything you can as soon as you can fix it. The third mistake is going with carpet for rentals; instead, do high-quality laminate flooring. The fourth mistake is underestimating repair costs; it's always going to be more than what you think. The fifth mistake is underestimating the amount of time it takes to fix plans.

It's always going to take longer in the long run. My sixth mistake, which is not knowing what I was doing, is a basic understanding of the remodeling process, and that's going to help save you a lot of time and a lot of money in the future. My seventh mistake is trusting workers entirely. You need to be somewhat involved in the process and supervise just in case something is not done to your liking.

As always, I thank you so much for watching, and thank you so much for your support. If you haven't already, click Subscribe. We're releasing a lot more videos in the future, so if you want to stay tuned with that, click Subscribe. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram and Snapchat; I post there pretty much daily too. If you want to be a part of that, make sure to click Add on one of those. Thank you guys for watching, and until next time.