Someone dm’ed me on instagram and asked if I would share about how we have been able to renovate our home while pinching some pennies. My words…she didn’t actually say pinching pennies.

This is how we have done every house we have renovated, really. This is our fourth house and 3rd fixer upper. My husband is a five on the enneagram and so basically is always in fear that we need to save money and not spend anything, and as a result, we have learned to do a lot ourselves and tried to find ways to have high end design on a low-medium budget. For most of our lives, we have done this on a small ministry budget and we just are careful about how we spend money.

Here are some of the strategies that have helped up renovate with a tight budget:

• Credit Card Rewards. We strategically put things on credit cards (that we could pay off immediately), but would receive good rewards for. We have put every thing we could with our current house project on credit cards and so far the reward points have bought us a new computer, a couch, and a Nintendo Switch for our kids. Our initial goal was to use the credit card rewards to travel (thanks to the help Philip got by researching Brad Barrett’s awesome advice at ChooseFI), but you know, 2020…

• Watch YouTube Videos to learn DIY. Philip has learned how to do almost everything around the house by YouTube videos and asking other, more experienced people. Now that he has been doing this for 10 years, he has learned a lot and has the skills to do most basic renovation work. If you want to try to do DIY a project - most likely its on YouTube.

• BUT we do hire out some work…electrical work being one. We have even hired out tiling because someone could do it a lot faster than Philip. One way to save money when hiring work is you can see if there is a way you could assist them to cut down on the cost. (IE we hired an electrician, but Philip knew how to install the outlets and this was busy work for the electrician so we saved money doing this ourselves)

• Shop the Re-store. I’m not sure if these are everywhere, but they often have nice construction supplies for less. We ended up with a new Toto toilet for only $30 (this doesn’t mean much to me - but Philip was excited.)

• Shop around - especially second hand. A lot of times Philip gives me a really annoyingly cheap budget for things. He’ll say, “I want a tile for $1 a square foot,” and my favorites are $10 a square foot. But generally if I keep searching - I can find something similar to the high end product on the low end price. Our different personalities force both of us to be creative which generally ends up with us coming to creative solutions that neither of us would have thought of at first and I think this adds to our unique style. For example, I would choose a $10/ft tile and Philip wants $1/ft. This forced me to think about using cheaper tile creatively and resulted in using standard subway tile in a straight herringbone pattern in one of our new baths which ended up being awesome.

  • I love Facebook Marketplace and will set up an alert for things I am looking for. You might have a good flea market or thrift store near you. In the past year, I have had a couple great Facebook Marketplace finds…including this bench for $25.

• Think of ways you can generate income from design. We have typically bought fixer upper houses that, by adding our style to, we have forced appreciation. This has generated incredible profits when we sold that helped us to have the resources to invest both into more rental properties as well as our primary home. We have budgeted a little more for our current home because of the potential presented for income on AirBnB and VRBO.

• Airbnb. We fell into that idea in our last house in MA and bought our current house in VA because of the potential for rental income it had because of our great location and basement apartments. By creating a comfortable and well designed home (Katie’s goal) we also create a desirable short-term rental that we hope will cover most of our housing expenses (Philip’s goal). This concept has worked so well for us that Philip became a real estate agent and we bought an airstream to renovate and rent short-term trips.

• Wait. My last idea is wait it out. This home has been our biggest project yet. We had to get it livable for a family of five including a newborn, but we didn’t do everything…we won’t even get a lot of things done this year. We still have puke green carpet in our makeshift office. Two of the bathrooms and kitchen are very outdated. We don’t have a deck or patio, my wishlist could go on…BUT I’d rather be able to renovate to a space I truly love and not rush. PLUS, this helps clarify what we want to do. When you have the chance to live in the space, you might change your mind on how you design it.

• Okay, one more. BUT sometimes bandaids are okay and necessary. We used floor pops (affiliate link) on some of our flooring because we knew it would be a few years before we could afford what we wanted in part of the house. We knew we would be airbnbing our main home occasionally (strange, but common in the area we are in). We needed to make a couple of bandaid renovations to make it safe for a crawling baby and appealing to guests.

Did we miss anything?

Leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll try to get back with more details about how we have renovated on a budget.