The Hidden Cost of Poor Planning: Building Smarter for a Smoother Life

When you’re building or substantially renovating a home, it’s often all too easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm of it all. Swatches, mood boards, layout sketches drawn on every available piece of scrap paper – it’s all part of the adventure. And yet while the design stage can feel like the fun part, poor planning at this point can have repercussions in your everyday life. All too often, it is only once the dust has settled that the hidden costs make themselves clear. Not necessarily in your bank balance, but certainly in your day-to-day comfort, function, and ease.

Whether you’re planning out an extension or a full-scale new build, a bit of foresight – and the right team – can go a long way to ensure that your home supports the way you really live.

Small mistakes can become big headaches

When you picture the phrase “construction mistake”, you’re likely to see something dramatic – a load-bearing wall being knocked out, a leak in the roof, or the wrong bathroom suite being delivered and/or installed. In truth, many of the most disruptive errors are a lot more mundane, and can pass unnoticed until you realise the irritation that they allow to build in everyday life.

Picture the mistake again, but this time it’s:

• A superb new kitchen, but with no room for a bin.
• A master bedroom with lighting that can’t be controlled from the bed.
• A utility room so narrow that you can’t open the washing machine and be in the room at the same time.
• Charging points that are always halfway across the room.

These may seem like minor irritations. They are minor irritations, but because of how everyday they are, it builds up to a home that works against you, rather than flowing with you. Good planning is about eliminating these frictions in advance, because retrofitted solutions are usually half-measures at best.

What planning really means

We have a tendency to associate home planning with budgets and lists of materials, and these elements are certainly an indispensable part of the deal. Great planning, however, goes deeper. It poses the question: “How do you want to live your life every day – and how should your home respond to that?”

The answer to this question involves looking at things like:

• How you move through a space: avoiding bottlenecks, ensuring you don’t have to sidle anywhere
• Where you naturally pause, put things down, and need to switch on lights or power
• How things might change in the next 5-10 years: will you be welcoming new life into the household? Will anyone be leaving to go to university? Might you end up caring for an elderly relative?
• The balance between areas where people gather, and more private spaces where you can be alone.

A simple blueprint will not capture all the nuance involved in designing the space to suit you and yours. This is a feature of all decent acreage home designs that you might want to model your own build off. If you are doing it that way, you should find that you can make it a real success in no time. Consider what you need, what you are likely to need in future, and also sound out your contractors on the job. They’ll have done work like this time and again, and can relate information from previous jobs which might be useful for you to consider.

Why expertise pays off

There is a certain romanticism to doing it all yourself – learning as you do, managing new skills, trying to get the best deal on everything – but let’s be honest. Experience counts. Being able to work with a skilled construction team means you gain the benefits of all the jobs they’ve done in the past, and they’ve gained significant knowledge when it comes to turning vision into reality. They know what works in practice, which is why seasoned construction partners are worth more than their weight in gold. You’ll gain:

• An ability to spot flaws in a plan before a single brick has been placed
• Honest feedback on which of your ideas is viable
• A bag of tricks that benefits you when it comes to storage or additional space
• Awareness of – and an ability to navigate – planning regulations of which you might run afoul

The practicalities of building and renovating are not something that necessarily occur to someone doing this for the first time. You may have some excellent ideas, and these should certainly not be junked without consideration. It’s very much a matter of having the vision to create the ideas in the first place, and twinning it with the ability to make them come alive in 3D.

Why “fixing it later” is not the right option

Getting the job done is always a priority, and when you are working towards a deadline there is always going to be a temptation to power through a testing section of the work, telling yourself that if it doesn’t work out, you can always fix it later. The reality is that you probably won’t. And this isn’t a comment on your commitment to the job or anything else – it’s just that fixing it later is unlikely to be easy, cheap, or without several other smaller jobs attached to it. 

Once a build has been completed, it’s significantly harder to move a plug socket, knock out a wall, or reposition a light fitting; it’s much better to take the time to make the right decision while work is still ongoing. It’s more freeing mentally, too – once tools are laid down for good, you don’t have to think about anything beyond enjoying the fruits of your labour. Jobs left for later will nag at you until they’re done, and at that point they can create the need to repaint here, reseal a window there, and all of a sudden that quick fix has become another renovation.

Ask the right questions in the beginning

There is only one way to remove those feelings of “if only we’d thought of this sooner”, and that’s to think of things sooner. Ask yourself, and anyone involved with the job, these questions right at the start:

• Where do we spend most of our time at home – and does the design take account of that?
• Are there daily tasks and chores that feel like a pain now? Can we deal with these in the new layout?
• Are we prioritising style over function, and will we regret that?

There are more questions you can consider, these are very much just a start. Others will occur to you, and it’s best to have them now. Because a renovation, or a new build, can be everything you’ve dreamed of – but it’s what you think of while awake that will make the difference.

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Becky

Meet the award-nominated UK lifestyle blogger behind Spirited Puddle Jumper – a mum of three living in South East London! Becky shares the real ups and downs of family life, parenting tips, and lifestyle inspiration, proving that being a mum doesn’t mean you stop being fun or having other interests! Follow along for honest insights into UK family life and opinions on a whole range of topics, from travel and food, to beauty reviews, home and DIY, business and health and wellness.