What everyone should know about using friends and family

While the makeup person was giving me a new face before my interview on 9am’s David and Kim yesterday, she told me about her own renovation experience. It was yet another example of the pitfalls involved in getting friends and family involved …

This renovator’s ex-father-in-law was a builder and when she and her ex-husband wanted to renovate their house, he said: “Let me help! I’ll organise all my tradies to do it”. Unfortunately this meant that this renovator couldn’t get quotes.

“How could I ask them?”, the father-in-law said. “They’ll be offended. But don’t worry - everything will be alright.” She felt they ended up paying even more than people who DIDN’T have a builder in the family.

The one bright spot in the whole thing was their kitchen. The father-in-law was pulling an almost-new one out of a house that was itself about to be renovated and so she snapped it up. “It’s jade green,” she told me, “with some missing cupboard doors which I had replaced in cherry red. People come to the house and just go ‘wow’.” They also saved a mozza doing it that way.

(Hint: for renovators on a budget try EBAY for kitchens other people are selling because they’re renovating. There are some good bargains to be had.)

The whole story reminded me of one I use in my book - The Renovator’s Survival Guide. In it, Margaret, one of the most capable people I know, tells the story of how she and the owner of the warehouse floor above her engaged an architect- friend to do the design.

“I know there’s an adage that you should never work with friends, but we did it anyway and it was a disaster,” she says.

The architect thought she’d drawn a $700,000 project but when quotes came back they were between $900,000 and a million dollars an over. “We were so plain about the fact that there was a genuine budget, that was not going to be exceeded, and so we wasted a lot of time with her,” Margaret says.

Of course, watching out for the pitfalls of building and renovating with friends and and family, isn’t the only tip you should take on board. There are plenty more in this interview with David and Kim - and I loved the fact that Kim’s husband apparently liked my book’s BLONDE MOMENTS! Check the interview out for yourself here.

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