For first-time home buyers, there’s a thrill that comes with the opportunity to make a space completely yours. All the unchangeable annoyances that plague a renter become solvable problems in the eyes of a new homeowner. Suddenly you can replace light fixtures, not just lightbulbs. You can swap out chipped tiles in the bathroom, transform too-high kitchen cabinets into shelves, or even take down entire walls.
With all those transformations on the docket, starting demolition the day after closing is tempting. But a slower approach can help create a home that not only looks good, but works well for you.
“It’s like dating someone,” said Katie Elliott, vice president of design at Schoolhouse, a lighting and housewares company based in Portland, Ore. “You need to date them before you live with them. Live in your home before you try to change it.”
Without taking the time to learn the qualities and quirks of a house, projects are more likely to be led by assumptions and aesthetics than function. “You know how you’re going to live in a space based on your last space, but it’s always different,” said Ms. Elliott, who lives in a 1950s house in Portland. (She painted and replaced floors before moving in, but waited three years to renovate her kitchen.)
“You have one pair of eyes when you just walk into a random apartment and a different one when you wake up there every morning, when you bathe there, when you prepare your meals there,” said Maryana Grinshpun, a principal of Mammoth, a New York design-build company. Without some lived-in perspective, she said, clients can approach the design process “like a kid trying to beat a piñata.” They don’t know what they want and “try to appease any whims they might have in the future.”
Ms. Grinshpun said her happiest clients are the ones who have been in their homes for a long time, and who come with “really specific gripes” and clear goals. For a recent project on Park Avenue, her clients gained a “pretty obscene amount of storage” with minimal changes to the floor plan because their brief was concise and focused, informed by years of living in the space.
The same advice applies to a more D.I.Y. approach to renovation. Kathleen Corlett, editor in chief at BobVila.com, moved into her Mount Kisco, N.Y., colonial nearly two years ago and has been tinkering with the kitchen ever since. Last renovated in the 1970s, the room was outdated but a good size and shape, with solid cabinets. “That gave us the freedom to take things a step at a time,” Ms. Corlett said. She started by painting the cabinets and the walls, high-impact choices that made the rest of the space feel more cohesive. “We lived with just that change for nearly 10 months,” she said.
“I’m a firm believer in ‘do it once, do it right’ renovations,” said Leonora Epstein, founder of the design Substack Schmatta and the former editor in chief of the home-design site Hunker. For kitchens and bathrooms, she advises waiting and saving rather than fixing on the cheap, “especially if you know you’re going to stay in that house for a really long time.”
Ms. Epstein has taken that approach in her own home, a Craftsman in Pasadena, Calif., which she bought two and half years ago. Since then, she’s painted the interior and exterior, removed “very bizarre chevron cladding around the fireplace,” and pulled out a dining room minibar. Bigger projects are planned for the future.
Given current housing costs, many new home buyers are likely taking a slow approach to renovation whether they like it or not. “Slow renovating and slow decorating are actual movements, or at least the internet likes to coin them as such, whereas people have been doing this for ages, but it’s just called ‘you don’t have the time or the budget,’” said Ms. Epstein. Thinking about renovation as a long-term series of projects rather than one monthslong saga can make a house that needs updating more attractive, at least financially.
These days, there’s more opportunity to buy a fixer-upper at a discount than there has been in recent years. A recent report from Zillow noted that before the pandemic, listings with terms like “fixer,” “T.L.C.,” “needs work” or “good bones” were more likely to sell than those without. But today, with rising mortgage rates and renovation costs, move-in ready homes are popular again, while fixer-uppers are selling for 7.3 percent less than similar homes, the largest gap in three years.
A slow-motion, room-by-room renovation doesn’t have to mean denying yourself creature comforts. On the contrary. Ms. Elliott always starts by putting up art, changing out lighting and putting down rugs — small, impermanent changes she calls “building blocks for a room.”
Similarly, Ms. Epstein recommends customizing the details of a space, like swapping out switch plates and outlet covers, stripping and polishing paint-laden hardware on doors and windows, and painting doors and trim.
The compressed time scales of HGTV shows and TikTok posts can make it seem like fixing up a house is a one-and-done, before-and-after experience. But in reality, a house is more like a living organism, always changing. And that’s a good thing. “It doesn’t ever have to be done,” said Ms. Elliott. “And maybe that’s overwhelming, but that can be freeing too because nothing has to be precious.”
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