10 More Common Mistakes in Renovation That Nobody Warns About

The renovation in this three-bedroom apartment located in the Warm Spring district of Moscow lasted four and a half months. Throughout the entire renovation, designer Lyudmila Danilovich conducted author's supervision over its progress to avoid obvious and not-so-obvious blunders that are often discovered after the renovation is complete. That's why monitoring at every stage of renovation is essential.

But who will conduct author's supervision if you do the renovation yourself, without a designer? Lyudmila Danilovich explained and showed what important points you should pay close attention to if you hire builders and do the renovation yourself.

Here a solid oak board and ceramic granite are laid. It's important to make them at the same level so there's no step where you might trip later. If the board is laid with adhesive, we can beautifully finish this joint by using a cork compensator or parquet sealer.

If you use laminate or install parquet planks floating, you can't do without a threshold because the edge of the parquet plank must be securely fixed to use a cork compensator or parquet sealer. Therefore, the advice here is to use as little tile as possible, make a single covering in some areas, and lay tiles only in "wet" zones: bathroom, toilet.

There should be a gap between the floor covering and door opening. However, if you don't use door casings (or use them only on one side, as here), this can become a problem and the gap will irritate you for life. Therefore, it's important to make a perfect joint of floor coverings at these points, whether it's tiles, parquet, or laminate, to avoid any gaps and cracks.

Now it's popular to use tiles in combination with painting in bathroom decoration. Often, builders tile up to the edge of the door opening, and you're left with nothing but to install the casing on top of the tile. Where there's painting, a gap remains, into which you have to stuff something, then spackle and paint, resulting in a different thickness and looking unattractive. If you have tiles like a boar tile, the tile's edge will look unappealing. Therefore, we do this: don't extend tiles on both sides of the door opening, then install the casing, and only after that tile up to the edge.

If you plan to install a double sink or two sinks, it's important to have a separate water supply line for each faucet from the manifold. Otherwise, when one faucet is turned on, the water pressure in the other will drop, making it impossible to use both sinks simultaneously.

Outlets and switches near the bed side tables should be installed after you've chosen and ordered these tables. If you don't know what model you'll use, then install outlets as high as possible, for example, at a height of 90 cm.

They are needed in long corridors, on staircases, and in passage wardrobes, as in this project. Ceiling lighting in the bedroom and light in the wardrobe, if you forget about it, can be turned off without getting out of bed. These solutions make life much easier.

Wallpapers from the same batch can slightly differ. Therefore, it's important to use only one batch of wallpaper for one room. For the wardrobe in this project, there wasn't enough roll of wallpaper, so it had to be bought from another batch. We were lucky that the shade matched, but it doesn't always happen. Therefore, it's better to be careful or buy a little extra wallpaper.

They're often forgotten, but Lyudmila Danilovich always includes such outlets in her projects. You'll be glad they exist, especially before New Year: it's convenient to plug in holiday garlands into these outlets. As the designer's many years of practice have shown, every client finds a use for this outlet: plug in speakers, a table lamp, an electronic candle, or just charge the phone.

Often, a wire for a light fixture appears on the wall that can't be turned on or, conversely, a switch that doesn't turn anything on. This is a mistake. You should plan the lighting scheme and switch attachment in advance. If there's an extra wire, a ceiling lamp with built-in switch will save you.

Before ordering the entrance door, you need to ensure it will align with your finished floor level. For this, during the rough work stage, you should mark the level of the screed with a laser and add the thickness of the floor covering to it. This will be the point from which you'll measure.

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