6 Ways to Protect Your Home During Renovation

Remodeling your home to suit your lifestyle can be exciting when it’s all said and done. Living through a remodel can be a bit more challenging, especially if you’re living in the house while the remodeling is being done. Depending on what you’re having done, there are a lot of moving pieces which can cause quite a mess during the project. Here are 6 ways to protect your home during renovation to ease the process for you on the way to the home of your dreams.

Protect corners and handrails

Even with the most careful renovation specialists, when you have workers in and out of your house, up and down the stairs, moving equipment from room to room, removing debris, and working with tool belts, your corners and handrails are going to take a beating. While it’s easy enough to fix this dings, dents and scratches, you can keep them to a minimum with a little prep work. Corners in high traffic areas can be protected with cardboard. Handrails on stairs can be bubble wrapped or protected with a material heavy enough to protect rails against scrapes and dents.

Cover your blinds, shutters and window treatments

If your renovation includes any kind of demolition, there is going to be dust. A LOT of dust. No matter how careful your workers are, that dust is going to go everywhere, and one of the hardest places to clean dust off is your window treatments. Here’s what you can do to protect your home during renovation:  Take a piece of plastic wrap that you can find at any home improvement store, and literally tape the plastic wrap over your window during demo. Be sure to use painter’s tape so you don’t take off the paint when you take off the tape! Most window openings that will be exposed to dust should be entirely covered with plastic, but for windows you need to open, cover the window treatments in plastic instead of removing them.

Cover your furniture and any countertops in plastic

You might be doing renovations in another room entirely, but dust travels. Unless you want to spend the next month after your project is complete dusting your tables and countertops, as well as vacuuming all your furniture, you should cover all of it in a loose plastic. It may not be very attractive during renovation, but you’ll save yourself a lot of clean up time afterwards by doing this before renovation starts.

Turn off the A/C or cover your vents

Dust travels fast through air vents to if you can cover them, it’s a great way to keep dust to a minimum. If possible, turn you’re A/C off altogether to keep dust from traveling from room to room.

Cover your traffic areas to avoid damage

If you have workers going up and down your stairs, regardless of whether your stairs are wood or carpeted, it’s a very good idea to cover the stairs to keep staining and damage at bay. Be sure to pick up a paper that is appropriate for walking on and doesn’t create a trip or slip hazard. For those high traffic areas in the house, put down a similar cover, as well as the main pathway in and out of the house.

Beyond the dust:  protecting from damage and theft

You may be forced to temporarily relocate during large-scale home renovation or construction projects. When the construction crew leaves each day, your home and belongings are left unsupervised and may be at risk of theft. In-home cameras can be a good way to keep an eye on things and of course, always ensure the home alarm system is set when workers leave. Construction projects often involve new electrical wiring and highly combustible materials throughout the house that can lead to a devastating fire. Keep working fire extinguishers on each level of the house and throughout the work site. Consider installing a sprinkler system and a UL-listed (Underwriters Laboratories) water flow alarm if you don’t already have one.

These are just a few ideas to protect your home during renovation to make sure your experience during the project is a good one!

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