Home improvement is what you do to keep your house intact. That would include maintenance and repairs or replacement of worn materials or appliances.
Home renovation is what you do to enhance the architectural integrity of your home, to make it function better for the way you want to live. It’s a slow artful process that involves a lot of thought and planning.
Home improvement is pretty easy. You shop for the building materials you need and hire a contractor to do the installation. It’s basically a retail transaction.
When your roof has a leak, you have to fix it. When your kids or pets are determined to go dashing out of the yard and into your street, you fence the yard. You don’t have a choice. You fix it. That’s home improvement.
When the layout of your home no longer works for your growing family, or when you are tired of the old crappy look of your dingy 60’s bathroom--you don’t have to fix it. It works. You just don’t like the way it works. But you can make do. You can live with it.
You have choices.
But what if you can’t ‘live with it’ and you don’t want to move? Then you choose renovation. Because you love the neighborhood or the setting, you decide to love the house a little bit more.
Renovation is a commitment to place. It’s also an exciting exercise of imagination to design into a house the features that could have been there/should have been there but were left out of the original plan 30, 60, 90 years ago.
So you decide to take that journey because it’s worth it to you to wake up everyday in a place that you’ve made truly your own.
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