Darren Palmer’s advice on the best areas of your home to spruce up for under $10,000

 If you have managed to gather together a tidy pile of money to add value to your home here are my top ideas on how to best use your loot.

While $10,000 can be hard to come by all at once, if you have managed to gather together a tidy pile of money to add value to your home here are my top ideas on how to best use your loot.

Skylights

Structural changes mean trades and trades absorb budgets, but a nice, predictable and fairly straightforward way to bathe your rooms with light is with the installation of a skylight.

Velux skylights are cost-effective as single units – installation being one of the major costs due to having to remove roofing, shore up the structure to allow for a new opening, and rectification of the ceiling once the installation is complete.

All going well though, and especially if you’re willing and able to repaint your ceiling and skylight void yourself, you should be able achieve a dramatic change to any room for under $10,000. When assessing your room’s needs, have a look at whether your budget can accommodate several skylights as they have more impact when multiplied.

A fairly straightforward way to bathe your rooms with light is with the installation of a skylight.

Solar panels

In a car trip recently the gentleman behind the wheel was showing me an app on his phone that showed how much his solar panels were taking off his power bill.

We chatted about his full set-up with the total cost of 30 panels being something like $14,000, although you can obviously scale that down for your house size and budget.

He was saving several hundreds of dollars a quarter on his energy bills. The saving wasn’t the feel-good factor for him though, it was knowing he was doing his bit for renewable energy, for his kids and his grandkids, that really lit him up.

Floor plan

Right at this moment I’m trying to rejig my downstairs floor plan to make best use of the space.

It’s going to take moving a few timber stud walls and distributing any load that might be borne by them, and moving some furniture around to make best use of the access to the outdoors.

Look at drapery that’s ready-made to bring down the luxury price tag.

With any construction work, though, you can only get predictable prices from thorough and water-tight documentation to send out to tender, but with the arrival of Hi Pages it seems that process is even simpler.

Getting a fixed price and a clear contract around a defined scope of work allows you the best chance to fit your works within a budget, though it’s always wise to keep 10 to 20 percent of your budget aside for contingencies or any changes of heart.

Decor

If you want to make your home a true reflection of your personality and a wonderful cocoon of wellbeing to shut out all the troubles of the world, you need to invest in that extra layer.

Whether your desired mood is light and bright, dark and sultry, minimalist or heavily decorated, you need to layer in paint colours, wallpapers, decor and soft furnishings, all of which you can achieve, especially with some DIY prowess and a good eye for a bargain.

Sales are wonderful things to get the best bang for your buck.

Look at drapery that’s ready-made to bring down the luxury price tag, but however you piece together your aesthetic, giving it an extra layer will offer a sense of wellbeing that you will find hard to feel anywhere else but home.