The 10 first steps to follow in an integral reform

Prior to any intervention at home it is very important to know what a house renovation includes and what are the first steps to follow before executing any customised work. For this reason, today’s article is dedicated to explaining how to renovate a house, flat or workspace.

A renovation is usually a job that requires a lot of dedication and you need to be prepared for it. It is normal that, being your first intervention or renovation project, you feel overwhelmed and you are not very clear about where to start to renovate a house, business or commercial area.

But… Don’t worry! In this intervention you won’t be alone and you will have the help of the team of architects and interior designers that you have hired to make the interior design of your dreams come true.

For this reason, and in order to make the preparation of your renovation much easier, from the interior design studio Molins Design we recommend you to follow the following steps to the letter:

In order for nothing to go wrong in a reform it is essential to know before the work what the specific needs of the project are and to determine everything that needs to be done. Therefore, getting the plans of the current state of the space is one of the first steps to follow in an integral reform.

With the plans in hand, we will be able to know our starting point and draw the interventions to be carried out in a safe way. In many cases, we must ask the local council or the former owner for the plans of the space. However, you can also ask the developers who have helped you to rent or buy the property.

In this second phase of the renovation, it is crucial to obtain the electrical, plumbing, heating and air conditioning plans (if any) of the space. Thanks to this first contact, we will know what type of installations there are and in what state they are in.

We must also know the exact place where all these installations are located within the space to be refurbished. In order to subsequently study and adjust them if they are to be changed or renovated as part of the intervention.

Next, we need to know where the building’s original downpipes are. With this, we can check the complete plumbing installation of the house and the exact location of the bathrooms.

Something that will be essential if we want to move or relocate the WC of the washbasins in the space to be refurbished.

Where will we take the rubble down and where will we take the material up? This is one of the first steps to follow in an integral reform, to improve the way architects and decorators work.

We must know the entrance and exit areas of the space, in order to know from which door, window or balcony we will be able to enter and exit materials. Remember that the success of a complete renovation also lies in keeping the building site clean at all times.

Another of the first steps to follow in an integral reform is to take a look at the contracted power.

We are probably going to need more power than we currently have, so we will probably have to resize the electrical panel of the space to be refurbished.

Where should the air conditioner be placed? This is one of the questions you should answer as soon as possible.

This part of the system should be installed on the outside of the house, so that it can extract the heat and cool the inside.

According to the standard, air-conditioning systems should ideally be placed on a horizontal surface, ideally on the roof of the building.

As you may already know, most building work begins with demolition. At this point, it is vital to be aware of the real space we have. For example, it is not the same to remove the rubble from a seventh floor to be refurbished as from a ground floor house with a garden.

Therefore, one of the first steps to follow in a complete renovation is to find the ideal place to store the rubble in authorised sacks and containers. It should be an exterior location close to the building, easily accessible and not an obstacle or danger for the rest of the activities.

One of the main steps in a renovation is to determine the structure of the building to be worked on. Generally speaking, there are two types of structures: lattice structures and old structures.

The lattice structure buildings are made up of a set of interconnected and interlocking bars joined by means of rigid nodes, in charge of transmitting the loads applied in two directions.

So, if your space to be renovated is of this type, you will be able to knock down partition walls without the danger of damaging the rest of the structure.

However, buildings with an old structure often contain load-bearing walls that cannot be pulled down. Therefore, in these cases, we must carefully study which walls or partitions we can raise again and restore.

Si vamos a realizar una reforma es importantísimo que avisemos a nuestra comunidad de vecinos. Para ello, debemos dejar claro que contamos con todos los permisos de obra para hacer nuestro proyecto de obra a medida.

But it is also our duty to provide adequate information on how long the reform period will last.

Among the first steps to follow in a house renovation is the study of the cracks that may appear in our project.

Problems and other original pathologies that the building may suffer from and that will surely end up modifying the final budget of our refurbishment.