There is not a man alive who has not dreamt of doing his own building renovations. It is even more satisfying when he can stand next to his son and say:” we do building renovations”. It really is a return to our roots when we say that we do our own building renovations. Something about going back to the days of the hunter/ gatherer and a man needing to provide shelter for his family makes us love the idea of doing building renovations. But as is so often the case with lofty ideals; it is not for everyone, because not all people have the necessary skills and patience to really be able to say that “we do building renovations.”
Gone are the days when renovations were just a matter of buying the materials and getting a few buddies over to help. That slap-dash approach to building renovations is long gone. We no longer accept that regular folk can do their own renovations because of various factors: firstly there is the safety factor, because building renovations done by amateurs can lead to major safety issues and by this leads to the other factor, namely resale. No one is going to want to buy a home when the owners are just regular folk and they are claiming that they did the building renovations themselves.
We may have accepted these fifty years ago but no more. Building renovations, be they major or minor, all require about twenty different forms to be filled in and the approval of numerous inspectors. Just because you own the property does not mean that you can renovate building as you see fit. This bizarre concept is actually quite necessary because it protects people who do not have a clue about building and what goes into renovations. It sets a standard that all builders have to adhere to if they want to keep their licences and hence keep on trading. Building renovations are costly because of all this red tape but it also adds up to peace of mind for anyone coming along at a later stage to buy the property.