Keep Your Sanity when Renovating with Chase Freedom Unlimited

This post was made in collaboration with Chase Freedom Unlimited. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

We’re rolling into the last and final month of our home renovation, hopefully! It’s been a whirlwind of emotions as we worked through this process and we’ve learned a LOT about what went well and what didn’t work to our favor during these past few months. If you’re embarking on a home renovation project, heed this article as a guide before you start!

chase freedom unlimited

What we learned on our home renovation journey:

One) Budget more time and money.

We learned quickly (especially once we found all the mold on the plaster) that the initial timeline and cost of a home renovation project is extremely optimistic when the architect puts it all together. Our secret sauce to combating this was choosing affordable materials (like light fixtures, tiles, and cabinets), shopping during major holiday sales to ensure our dollars went far, and applying our cash back from our Chase Freedom Unlimited card to our purchases as well. We’ve been using our Chase Freedom Unlimited card because we earn 1.5% cash back on everything, so it helps ease the hurt of the four extra weeks of construction we didn’t budget for.

Two) Know your lead times on major components (appliances, counters, utilities, etc.) to plan a secure timeline in case things go wrong.

When we started our journey, we had a very rough timeline of what the project was going to look like, so we never really checked up on lead times for when products would be delivered/available. If we had started with finding out the lead time for every major purchase and then worked backwards, we could probably be cooking in our southern kitchen sooner than anticipated.

chase freedom unlimited

Three) Have a wine variety on hand to celebrate when it’s over.

We have one bottle of celebratory wine on-hand that we’re saving for the day we’re told we can schedule the movers and come home, and we have one bottle on hand for if things go terribly wrong. So, either way it plays out, we still win – ha! This is another part of the secret sanity sauce of home renovations, and naturally we used our cash back from our previous home renovation purchases to buy our celebratory wine! I love that I’m always earning on every purchase with my cash back credit card, bringing us one step closer to our goal and closer to celebrating once we’re home.

Author: Cynthia

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *