Guide to Home Renovation during your Retirement
Retirement provides an opportunity for homeowners to reshape their home. It’s where you’ll be spending plenty of leisure time in the coming years, and therefore it’s worth spending the time and money to ensure it’s in decent shape.
Budgeting
Your first priority should be to determine how much you reasonably have available to spend, and what you’d like to do with it. It’s tempting to be frugal here, especially considering what can be achieved with relatively little. But if you’ve got a large lump sum to play with, you might equally be tempted to spend it all on your renovations at once, so that you can enjoy it for as long as possible. Whatever your budget, it’s important that you’re aware of it, so that you can handle it with care. If it helps, get it written down, and get ballpark figures for all of the components of your renovation.
Funding
Where you get the money from will depend on your circumstances. If you’ve been contributing to a pension pot throughout your life, it might be that you have plenty of money to play with. For many retirees, releasing funds from the home is a more viable option. If you’re eligible for equity release from your home, then renovations are a sensible place to put that money to use.
Planning
So once you’ve found a source of funding, where should you direct it? Think about the areas of the home that you’ll be using the most during your retirement, and ask yourself which rooms could benefit most from changes. A new kitchen might allow you to spend more time cooking creatively – and if you’ve already got a fondness for home-cooked meals, then this might be an investment that pays dividends every day.
On the other hand, you might look to convert entire rooms, or to construct new ones as part of an extension. If you’d like to remain active during your retirement, then you might transform the garage into a home gym, or dedicate it into a workshop for your hobby. If you’d like that little bit more living space during the summer, on the other hand, then a conservatory might be what’s called for.
Accessibility
As we get older, we’re likely to become less mobile. In some cases, we might need mobility aids to get around the house more easily. These might come in the form of extra handrails on staircases, or in bathrooms and other areas where slippage is a concern. If you’re still able to get around easily now, then you might not want to think about making such additions later on – but if you can design your renovations in such a way that they can be easily appended, then you may help to make your life easier further along the line.
