Ideal Home renovation tips

Ideal Home has turned one homeowner’s over-budget extension into a five-point guide to cutting renovation costs without stripping out the finish. The post comes from Leah Hodson, an Ideal Home Open House contributor, who wrote that her side return extension and kitchen renovation had reached week 11 after a builder first estimated 5 weeks. She said weather, structural issues and last-minute design changes pushed costs higher. Her clearest example was the worktop choice: Hodson said she dropped marble or quartz in favor of compact laminate because it was cheaper, more durable than quartz in her view, and could be cut with standard carpentry tools rather than specialist stone-cutting equipment. Ideal Home’s wider kitchen coverage also describes laminate as a lower-cost route to the look of pricier materials. The advice lands into a market where budget extensions remain a live concern for homeowners trying to add space without moving. Ideal Home’s March 2025 guide to cheaper kitchen extensions says costs rise with size, and recommends smaller footprints, simpler designs, standard materials, reuse and second-hand buying. The magazine’s own renovation editor, Sarah Handley, has framed the same problem in stricter budgeting terms: set a fund, hold back 10% to 15% as contingency, track every spend, and separate needs from wants before work starts. That matches Hodson’s approach of spending on items that are expensive to change later and saving on elements that can be upgraded later. Ideal Home has been building out this renovation diary for months. In earlier entries, Hodson documented the start of the project, said she could not afford the rear apex extension she first imagined, and later described the build at week 5 and week 7 as walls went up and delays mounted. That helps explain why the post is circulating as a compact how-to rather than a one-off shopping list. It packages one real project’s delays, substitutions and trade-offs into a short set of decisions other homeowners can copy when an extension runs longer and costs more than planned.