Take a little time before you refurb

I am often asked what is the best time to extend or renovate your home. My answer is: when you know exactly what you want. Often this means once you’ve lived in your home for enough time to figure out what the best modifications would be.

I heard a great story about the heads of a university in California who built all of the buildings on campus and when faced with planning the pathways decided to leave it for a year and see what tracks were formed by the students taking their preferred routes across the grass. Once these muddy tracks were firmly established they paved them.

I love this story because it’s an example of designing with people in mind. It also shows that sometimes it’s best to wait and see what the best solution to a particular design issue is.

The campus designers could have discussed the layout of the pathways with the students and then laid them based on this feedback but the result wouldn’t have been as successful as leaving it to see how the students actually started to move through the campus.

I meet a lot of people who say “I wish I’d lived in the house for a while before doing the work, or, if I knew how we’d use our home at the time we did the work I’d have done things differently.”

If you can manage to postpone work until you have lived in your home for a while you will learn a lot and be better informed about how to refurbish or extend. The clearer your vision for how you want your home to be, the smoother the whole process will be.

By living in the house you’ll come to learn what you like and don’t like, where you like to spend time, where people tend to congregate and the areas that you don’t tend to use at all. You’ll also see where the day-to-day inefficiencies are. For example, I found in my own home that laundry tended to accumulate upstairs while the ironing and washing was done downstairs, and then everything went back upstairs again to be put away.

I moved my laundry room up to the first floor and suddenly the chore of doing the laundry became easier and more efficient. I could never have made this decision without living in the house first.

Right from the time you purchase your home your circumstances will change. Life moves very quickly and we often struggle to keep up.

By waiting for a while you’ll not only have a chance to plan your refurbishment with far more insight into your home’s limitations and strong points, you’ll also have a clearer picture of your future plans.

This will help you to future-proof your home and build in some flexibility so it can be adapted as the needs of your family change. This can be one of the biggest challenges for people planning to refurbish a house they have never lived in.

By waiting you’ll also have a chance to save so you’re more likely to have a budget that will enable you to do the work without compromise. It’s far better to be in a position to do all of the work that you want to do in one go.

If your plans include an attic conversion, it's best to get it done with the rest of the work. Not only will it cost you less but the thought of having to go through the disruption of builders in your home again later may stop you from ever doing it. Denise O'Connor is an architect and design consultant