Homeowners: Improve your property

Homeowners should be encouraged to make improvements to their UK property, as many renovating and decorating  jobs, which can often make a big change in the home, can be carried out without having any sort of extensive knowledge about doing such work.

According to Jason Orme, editor at Homebuilding & Renovating, there has been an increase in recent years in the number of people who are now looking to make improvements to their own homes rather than hiring professional contractors to do so, which he said is unsurprising, as people try to reduce their expenditure in times of economic uncertainty.

This was also reported recently by the AA, when it said that people were resorting to making changes themselves in bids to save money.

The AA said that, over the last year, 14 per cent of people in the UK have taken up the challenge of completing some DIY jobs which they would have previously paid for someone else to do. For larger projects, a further 11 per cent have called in a favour from friends to make sure that they can get their DIY job done for free.

However, it also said that an increasing number were just putting off doing their improvements altogether. The AA said that this meant some eight per cent having suffered home damage as a result of waiting too long, with frozen pipes and roof leaks being the two most common issues.

Mr Orme said that as well as financial benefits to undertaking work on your own rather than hiring someone else, it can also be far more convenient.

"There is no safe guard necessarily in terms of getting somebody who claims to be a professional to do work that you could do yourself. The benefit is in making sure that you find people who are approved or have high recommendations – otherwise you may as well do it yourself, quite frankly."