Lifestyle creep is when you slowly continue to up the ante on your lifestyle requirements. Think about what you would do with 20% more annual income. If the answer is anything other than increase savings by 20%, that’s lifestyle creep in action. 

There’s a similar concept with home renovations – what we like to call project creep. Once ball is already rolling on a renovation, the incremental cost increase to do a lot more to your home is minimal, so it makes sense to do more and more – until, all of a sudden, a smaller project turns into a massive undertaking…but we’ll come back to this concept a little later.

Design for The Future You Want

One of the most important elements in designing a home is a focus on the value of time.

Think about where you want to be in life 5 years from now. What about 10? We know you can’t just hop in a DeLorean and go look at your future life no matter how much we want to. What you can do is look at your past and your present, then picture what you want to come next. 

How will your life likely change? If you have little children, let’s plan for a home with teenagers. Add a media room now and enjoy it with them for a few years before you let them take it over as a teen hangout. Maybe you plan to have children in the next 5-10 years. In that case adding a mudroom and extra storage space might really make life easier in the future. 

Of course, your design doesn’t need to revolve around kids at all. If the future you want is spending more working hours in your home office or fewer hours working and more on your favorite hobbies those are also ways to design the lifestyle you intend to have.

Little Upgrades, Big Impact

The time value of money is an abstract concept that basically means the concept that a sum of money is worth more now than the same sum will be at a future date due to its earnings potential in the interim. 

When applied to renovating your home, the value of renovating now is worth more than the same renovations later as you will be able to enjoy your home in the interim. 

This is one of the struggles people have with project creep – it feels like lifestyle creep and a lot of doubt is created. 

But when we create a space for you to enjoy with your family for years to come, it’s transformative in the sense that the value created is much higher than the upfront cost – even accounting for the natural project creep. 

Our job is to make sure that all projects not only fit in your budget, but deliver the home you’ve been dreaming of. In the design phase the cost is relatively low to allow for project creep to see how something could work – adding a butler’s pantry, turning the sideyard into an outdoor kitchen, maximizing storage space to also maximize cleanliness – without the accompanying cost of building it until it balances with the rest of the project. 

This ensures that you don’t get caught by unnecessary project creep and still get the full value of what a home renovation.

Ready to plan for your future home? Great! We are, too. Give us a call!