Discussions

Hello. I was wondering how I would go about determining how much to budget to some renovations done. I want to know ballpark figures so that I can get my financing organized. I understand that some work will be dependent on the materials used and extras/ quality of materials and how much sweat equity I put in.  
Are there resource materials that anyone has come across that was helpful?

It really depends on how you approach finances, to some degree.  
 
Let's use a bathroom, for example. You can easily spend $10k if you hire someone to do everything for you, even using not expensive finishes. But you could also say, "I have $5k to do this bathroom, now what's the most cost-effective way to use that money?"  
 
In our case, we hired someone to do the shower/surround because we weren't confident doing it, and did the rest ourselves. We got quotes for the portion we thought we wanted to hire someone for, and from there it helped us determine how much we had to spend on the rest. If we knew we were going to spend $2,500 on hiring someone to replace the shower, repair the wall etc, then we knew the rest had to be under $2,500 and selected the materials accordingly and just did the work ourselves. I'm just using that as an example.  
 
In some cases, there will be a minimum amount you will have to pay based on prices. Drywall is a good example - it costs what it costs. But it's also possible to do things in stages sometimes, or you need to prioritize projects based on available funds. This year, we needed a roof. There's other outside work we'd like to do, but the roof was priority, so we saved and quoted for the roof and got the roof done. Other work either gets deferred or revised according to budget (such as painting instead of new siding, for example, deferring new siding for 3-5 more years).  
 
That's how we do things. We always try to scale our projects according to the budget we have. It's slower for sure, but keeps us above water financially.