Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation

Renovation can be awful. It's not like the television shows - it's dirtier, harder and more stressful than any close-up can capture. It doesn't matter if you live in an apartment and need to repaint the lounge room or if you live in a harbourside mansion and need to rebuild the entire house, you can just about guarantee that things you haven't anticipated will go wrong, the budget will blow out and you'll want to shout at someone. But help is at hand.

Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation is your blueprint to a stress-free, well-planned and well-budgeted renovation that improves the value of your home. It helps you to plan a renovation to suit your available time, experience and money. It will also:

* Introduce you to the three R's: repairs, refurbishment and rebuilding

* Provide examples of room-by-room mission statements for easy planning

* Show you how to work out cost estimates and schedules

* Help you to build good relationships with builders and tradespeople

* Show you what happened in three real renovations: in a unit, a brick-veneer house and a semi

* Give you lots of money-saving and design tips

* Include helpful and practical diagrams, floor plans and tables

Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation is a complete how-to of assessing all your renovation needs. If you're thinking about improving your home (and want to survive the experience), you need this book.

In the middle of her second renovation, Alex May is the perfect person to write this book. She is a freelance writer who specialises in property and design. She writes property and design stories for The Sydney Morning Herald's Domain section and also has a column in The Sun Herald called Worth a Look.