Another 10 Mistakes in Apartment Renovation That Nobody Warns About

The renovation in this three-bedroom apartment located in the Warm Spring area of Moscow lasted four and a half months. Throughout the entire renovation process, 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 completed. That is why control at every stage of the 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 need to pay close attention to if you hire contractors and do the renovation on your own.

Joint of Floor Coverings

Here a solid oak plank and ceramic granite are laid. It is important to level them at the same height to avoid a step that you will stumble over later. If the plank is laid using adhesive, we can beautifully finish this joint: use a cork compensator or parquet sealant.

If you use laminate or lay parquet planks floating, you will have to use a threshold anyway because the edge of the parquet plank must be securely fixed to use a cork compensator or parquet sealant. Therefore, the advice here is to use as little tile as possible, create a single covering in separate zones, and lay tiles only in "wet" areas: bathroom, toilet.

Door Openings

There should be a gap between the floor covering and the door opening. However, if you do not 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 is important to make a perfect joint between floor coverings exactly in these places, whether it's tiles, parquet, or laminate, to avoid any gaps or cracks.

Door Casings Adjoining Tiles

Now it is popular to use tiles in combination with painting in bathroom decoration. Often contractors tile up to the edge of the door opening, and you have nothing left but to install the casing on top of the tiles. Where there is painting, a gap remains, which you have to stuff something into, then spackle and paint, and it ends up with a different thickness and looks unattractive. If you have tiles like a boar, the tile edge will not look good. Therefore, we do this: we don't tile up to the door opening on both sides, then install the casing, and afterwards tile it flush.

Water Supply

If you plan to install a double sink or two sinks, it is important to make a separate water supply for each mixer from the manifold. Otherwise, when you turn on one mixer, the water pressure in the other will drop, and using both sinks simultaneously will be impossible.

Outlets in Bedroom

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

Passage Switches

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

Important Things to Know About Wallpaper

Wallpapers from the same batch may differ slightly. Therefore, it is important to use wallpaper only from one batch for one room. For the wardrobe in this project, there wasn't enough wallpaper roll, and it had to be bought from another batch. It was fortunate that the shade matched, but this does not always happen. Therefore, it's better to be careful or buy a little extra wallpaper.

Outlets on Window Sills

They are always forgotten, but Lyudmila Danilovich always includes such outlets in her projects. You will appreciate that they are there, before New Year's: it is convenient to plug holiday lights into these outlets. As designer's years of experience show, every client finds a use for this outlet: plug in speakers, a table lamp, or an electronic candle, or simply charge a phone.

Thoughtful Lighting

Often a light fixture output appears on the wall that cannot be turned on, or conversely, a switch that does not turn anything on. This is an error. You need to plan the lighting scheme and connect switches in advance. If there's an extra wire, you're saved by a wall-mounted switch in a lamp.

Entrance Door Level with Floor

Before ordering the entrance door, you need to ensure that it will align with your finished floor. For this, at the rough construction 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 will measure.

Watch the video of this renovation

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