SW CHICAGO Blog

5 Tips for a Holiday-Budget Home Renovation Plan in Southwest Chicago

With the holiday season coming around and the weather continuously cooling off, many homeowners find it difficult to fit home renovations into their budget. While trying to find gifts, plan meals, travel, or prepare for incoming guests, it can feel like a challenge to find space in your holiday spending to spruce up the house throughout this season.

It's important to think about your comfort and safety when it comes to searching for budget-friendly home renovations. The idea of home improvement can often seem expensive, especially when thinking about power tools and day-long projects; however, our team at Koala Insulation of Southwest Chicago has put together five easy and budget-friendly renovation ideas that will give the space a new, refreshed look and improve your home's overall health and comfort.

Stylizing the Windows

Updating your entertainment space doesn’t have to cost a fortune due to fancy new paint jobs, new floors, and furniture. Instead, you can learn to accent areas that highlight the depth and vibrance of the rest of the space. By focusing on the windows in your living or dining room spaces, you will help draw attention to the area that opens up your home. When you draw attention to windows, it can help make the space feel larger and more expansive.

Getting new drapes or shades is one of the easiest ways to change up your windows. Changing the color, adding vibrant patterns, or combining heavy and light fabrics is a cost-effective and easy way to liven up your apertures and seating areas. Additionally, by touching up the paint around the window sill, you can bring back some faded vibrance to the space. Adding color here draws the eye to the outside, helping in that expansive effect we mentioned.

Revamping the Bathroom Sinks

For homeowners that like to entertain visitors, bathrooms can become their own renovation projects. Whether it's buying newer appliances, themed towels, or local soaps and air fresheners, the bathroom is the one area of your home that your guests will be guaranteed to visit during their stay. Therefore it is a room that should be focused on in smaller parts to keep your renovations quick, easy, and budget-friendly.

The bathroom sink is a great place to start, especially during the holidays, where your guests can wash their hands before and after a meal. There are plenty of small and efficient ways you can make the environment more inviting. For example, stick-on wallpaper is an easy and affordable way to give the countertop a new look without entirely removing the unit. You can choose to go for the traditional marble print or you may try something more unconventional like floral or a vibrant pattern. Either way, stick-on wallpaper is most often “reusable”, making it easy to peel off and replace with something else.

Retrofitting Insulation

Retrofit insulation is the process of removing deteriorated insulation and reinstalling new material to improve the R-value. This measures its ability to resist heat transfer, the rate at which heat enters and escapes a building. While this can be one of the more time-consuming projects on our list, it's still a cost-effective way to improve the air quality of your home while also increasing comfort and safety. Insulation helps regulate the temperature throughout the house, which can help prevent drafts, cold spots, and the loss of heat.

With Koala Insulation of Southwest Chicago, we can provide free evaluations to help make the process more affordable and budget-friendly. Once we have a proper breakdown of the current condition of your home’s insulation by checking the material in your attic, walls, and floors we can help you target parts of your home that need to be retrofit soon, as well as plan maintenance on areas that need to be removed and replaced in the future.

Creative Storage Options

Adding creative storage options in your home can be a useful tactic for any room in the house. Whether you’re adding wicker baskets to the playroom or using cubby holes in your bathrooms for towels, you can give the environment a fresh look with slightly less conventional storage options.

You may be surprised to find there are several innovative storage ideas such as putting netting above a child’s bed to easily hold their stuffed animals and softer toys. You can also hang wicker baskets in the kitchen to make unique utensil holders. Add small, compact bins in your laundry room to bring the space more organization options and clear out some clutter. You can farm ideas from places like local home improvement Facebook groups or Pinterest boards.

Renovate Your Southwest Chicago Home with Budget-Friendly Options

With the business of the holiday season right around the corner, it can feel like you barely have time to decorate the house, let alone start a new home renovation project. Luckily, there are several small and cost-effective ways to improve your home’s vigor without taking up crucial planning time and without ruining your holiday budget. Just by adding style changes in the living areas or doing simple reconstruction projects in the kitchen and bathrooms, you have the ability to turn your home into a new environment without having to begin a long and extensive project.

With help from your local insulation experts at Koala Insulation of Southwest Chicago, this holiday season is also the best time to reevaluate your home's insulation. We offer free evaluations to determine the current condition of the house's insulation. This will give you the opportunity to target key areas of your home that work within your budget. Our team is dedicated to making your home comfortable and safe while also staying within your budget. Contact us today to schedule a free evaluation and learn more about insulation and air sealing.