Decide on the scope of your project. Approach it differently if it’s just 1 room or the whole house.

If one room – mostly people renovate kitchen & bathrooms, so let’s look at those…

• Decide on your ‘look’.
  • Start collecting images on Pinterest, find products you like. Check out Houzz for Decide on your look, what you like.
• Space planning
  • For example, doing a bathroom, using an expert is useful because they can help you squeeze in more than you think into space. Insert bathroom image of the layout (Bishops Mansions) and help you with the practicalities.
• Eg adequate lighting.
  • In bathrooms, with the advent of LED lighting, it’s much easier to get adequate lighting that conforms to IP regulations (which set out light fittings and their closeness to the source of water)
• Selection of floor.
  • It seems simple enough, but choosing the right tiles in a bathroom for slip avoidance, limescale build-up, and getting the right look. You may fall in love with a tile, but it may be a safety hazard, for example never put a high gloss porcelain tile in a kitchen or bathroom where water. Limestone may look appealing, but it cracks, it’s porous, it stains.
• Fixtures & fittings.
  • With a plethora of products on the market, selecting the right loo, bath, taps basin for your budget & scheme can be daunting. An expert is specifying and uses different products all the time and knows the tried and tested ones that will work. These come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, e.g one loo is not the same size as the next. Sometimes the whites are different too, so sourcing a loo from one company and a basin from another can result in noticeable variations of white.
• Ventilation
  • Important to consider in bathrooms and kitchens where trapped condensation can cause mold and mildew build-up and damage your decorated walls. In the kitchen, recirculating extractor fans should only be used when you absolutely cannot duct the air out. All they will do is remove the fatty deposits from the air. The best practice is to have one that ducts directly out of the building.
• Water pressure/boiler
  • Some taps and shower fittings simply don’t work on low water pressure. Plumbers can give you the water pressure to buy fittings accordingly. some taps don’t work with combi boilers. Some taps pull the water through the combi boiler faster than it can heat it up.
• Underfloor heating
  • We recommend you install any underfloor heating with a timer. These also enable you to flick a switch to override the timer if necessary.
• Paint 
  • For bathrooms, some of the larger paint manufacturers with mold inhibitors. You have to consider the type of paints for your family. A child with asthma, or highly allergic may A lot of talk recently about modern paints being too chemical-based, but there is a question over whether. Paints based on chalk or lime allow the plaster to breathe and have natural mold inhibitors. Eggshell (oil-based) and satinwood (water-based) is semi-gloss finish and are used for woodwork which needs to be sealed. Vinyl matt is the petrochemical flat finish paint we mostly use. Matt is a dead flat finish, whereas vinyl has a slight sheen.

RJV’s Renovation Advice service will help you through the hugely rewarding and occasionally rocky road of home renovations. We’ll support you whenever you need us, but ultimately you’re in the driver’s seat.

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