How To Plan a Room Makeover

After hours on Pinterest and online dutifully pinning inspirational room design pictures to your board, it is high time to start planning out your room makeover. But where do you start? How do you know if your ideas will look right in your space? How can you best foresee any possible hiccups in the DIY room makeover?

I’m here for you.

In this post, a free planning guide for your room design is provided. This is the planning process that works for me when designing any project or update to a room.

Use the Project Planning Guide

This free printable planning guide will allow you to identify the room, the budget, and the date you want things completed. Identify your goals for the space. Organization, more room to hang out, or storage may be some of those goals. List any obstacles or elements of the room to eliminate or accommodate. Once the guide is filled in you can create a mood board for the space.

This planning guide is a worksheet to help brainstorm priorities for the room makeover and to help prevent any obstacles or additional costs that may occur. Here’s the free Project Planning Guide 1

Mood Board

A mood board is a great way to see all the elements or inspiration for the room in one place. Create a board on Pinterest with links to products or the places to purchase the products for the best price.

Put together your own mood board on the computer, on paper or on poster board. Attach images of design, swatches of fabric, paint chips, or pictures from catalogues to the board and figure out what works together. Sometimes I end up purchasing an item that is similar to that on my mood board but not the exact item, and that is just fine.

Remember to start with an element like a rug, fabric, or tile that you love and then coordinate the paint color to that item. It is very difficult to pick a paint color and then try to find textiles in a shade that matches perfectly. Paint can be tinted, other items are not as easy to change.

Measure Twice

Take down all of the measurements of the room. This includes the height and length of each wall, the size of the doors, windows and baseboards. Include the locations of any vents, electrical or plumbing that will affect the space, and also any permanent features. The more details you have accurate, the better your planning will be.

Sketch it Out

This is the fun part, sketching it out. The sketch does not have to be extremely detailed. The point is to help you envision the look of the space and the things you want to change. Many of my sketches have been done on napkins while on a plane. However, if trying to show my husband or a client my concepts, there’s more confidence in my vision with a good sketch.

An accurate “before” sketch on graph paper maps out all of the measurements previously taken down. A floorplan view (top looking down) and a view of the elevation (eye level) are great ways to visualize the space. Accuracy can help calculate needed materials and therefore a better estimate of overall cost. To accurately draw your sketches, use graph paper, a ruler, a tape measure, a pencil, a pen (for permanent features) and colored pencils.

Once an original floorplan is created, it is easy to trace over the permanent features onto another piece of graph paper. Use a copier (or a printer) to make copies of the outline of the room, fill in the copies with penciled in items until you come up with a configuration you like. Then draw out the modifications, but keep it to scale.

At this point, I noticed my plan to possibly add shiplap to the wall behind the deep sink would have an issue. To accommodate the thickness of the wood, the sink would need to be moved out a bit. Moving the sink would require work on the plumbing. That means the cost of that wall goes up significantly. Weighing the advantages and disadvantages allowed me to alter the focal wall. Instead, I toyed with the idea of adding floor tiles to the adjacent wall.

Price Out Items

Once your room concept is complete, you can start shopping around and pricing out items. For example, the light in my laundry room can be found at Wayfair, Joss and Main and Home Depot. An online search of the product name and brand supplied all the buying options. Home Depot had the lowest price allowing me to apply the savings to other elements of the room design.

Create a spreadsheet of bigger ticket items. Include the product name and product number, stores where it can be purchased, links to the stores, cost, any coupons or discounts, and any shipping charges. This side by side comparison helps to determine the best source for your purchases. The bonus is it can also make you feel pretty good about getting the best deal. (That, and it’s good leverage for negotiations with your other half.)

Modify and Make Changes

Before bringing the room makeover to reality, go over your design decisions and budget. Are you in love with all of it? If anything is bothering you or won’t work in the space, now is the time to make changes.

Changing from the shiplap, which would cost a couple hundred dollars, to using the floor tiles on the wall will save over $100. At first, I kept trying to get the shiplap idea to work, even priced out to do a faux shiplap with MDF. It was going to be a lot of work and expense when not a lot of the wall would even be exposed to see the shiplap. Going through this planning process allowed me to adjust and come up with an easier and less expensive idea. Using floor tiles on the adjoining wall would be cheaper and less labor intensive than the shiplap. That works for me!

Be Prepared and Realistic

Break up the tasks, put them in order of when to do them, and schedule them out over time. Be realistic with the amount of time it will take to accomplish a task. Set deadlines to keep on track.

Have all your supplies together and area prepped before your work day. If you are ready to start and have everything you need, you are more likely to get the project finished in a timely manner. It is a big pain to have to run to the home supply store a couple of times for each project. Prevent making more work for yourself than needed.

Get to Work!

Once everything is thought out, sketched out, approved and ordered, get to work. The room may look worse before it gets better, but it will all be worth it in the end. Great satisfaction can be found when the work is complete and you can say, I did that.

I am so looking forward to starting my laundry room makeover now. Each task completed, each room finished, is one step closer to making a house a home.