Top 4 Rooms to Renovate in Your Home with Smarthome Technology

Renovating your home is an exciting and often stressful time.

How much you invest into your home on a renovation and dividing that budget across the different spaces in your home is critical to maximise your ideal outcome and increase the value of your home in the long run too.

As a rule of thumb - investing no more than 2-3% of your home’s value into any one room and no more than 10% of the home value in total.

This home renovation investment matrix below provides a guideline on how much you should be investing without over capitalising on your renovation.

Ultimately you want to enhance your lifestyle and smarthome technology has a role to play in enhancing your lifestyle and increasing the value of your home.

Smarthome Technology is more Accessible than ever Before

Installing smart home technology used to be an all or nothing approach. That is, either you have it everywhere or you don’t have it at all.

This was due to how legacy smart home systems needed to be wired and cabled throughout homes for them to operate and if you didn’t have it done, then it was just too expensive to retro-actively add it to the home.

Times have changed and its now possible to start with just a few key rooms and expand when you have more funds or you want to add further enhancements to your home and lifestyle.

Number source: https://hipages.com.au/article/renovation_guide_how_much_does_it_cost_to_renovate

In the grid above we have assumed the home is worth $500,000 and the total renovation will not exceed 10% of the home’s value.

That means we have a $50,000 home renovation budget.

The grid provides a High and a Low renovation budget with average spends for each room for renovating in Australia.

On the right in green is the approximated cost of installing a smarthome system like SAL PIXIE, which uses existing wiring and wiring practices to reduce costs and provides wireless smarthome control of:

• Lighting - downlights, table lamps, floor lamps
• Blinds - electric & battery powered
• Appliance control - Kitchen, bathroom, living room
• Garage door control

And provides the following capabilities:

• Voice Control - Google, Amazon, Apple (SIRI)
• Mobile phone & Tablet control - iOS & Android
• Wall plate control
• Scheduling - 24 hour 7 days
• Timers - 1 minute to 24 hours
• Scenes & groups - create whole house moods instantly

As you can see the PIXIE smarthome investment is less that 10% of the overall renovation budget for a $50,000 renovation and no more than about 2% of any single room.

This second matrix assumes a $1,000,000 home value and the PIXIE smarthome investment in hardware is about 5% of the total value of the renovation budget, and about 1% of each of the total room renovation budget.

Research from Houzz in the graph below shows that the top 4 rooms that homeowners are choosing to renovate in Australia are the same top 4 renovation rooms for smarthome technology we have recommended.

Additionally, the priorities homeowners state for undertaking renovation are good news for smarthome inclusions. Each one of the elements in the image below are impacted in a positive way with the installation of a smarthome system like SAL PIXIE.

Why Invest in Smarthome Technology During Your Home Renovation?

No matter what anyone says, the only reason to invest in smarthome technology in a home in which you are going to live is to enhance your lifestyle - whilst you are living in it.

Many providers state the smarthome technology increases the value of your home, and that may be true - read this article to understand why sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

Taking the investment ROI discussion off the table then, there are 2 items left to sway our decision.

1. Does the smarthome tech enhance your lifestyle whilst you are living in your home?
2. Is it worth it to you?

These can be evaluated on a very short list of benefits:

• Comfort
• Convenience
• Safety
• Security
• Savings (energy)
• Status

How to Include Smarthome Technology in these Top 4 Renovation Rooms

Wrapping up, provided below are 3 simple smarthome items to include in each of these renovated rooms, to get the most from your smarthome investment, using SAL PIXIE product range as an example.

Kitchen Smarthome Renovation

The kitchen is one of the most used and most expensive rooms to renovate. As its used the most it will benefit most from introducing smarthome technology.

1. Smart dimmers for overhead lighting control - downlights and pendants
2. Smart LED strip controllers for under kitchen island and inside kitchen cabinet lighting control
3. Smart plugs and / or smart power points - for scheduling and safety

As all SAL PIXIE devices can be controlled from the wall, from an App and with your voice, when the SAL PIXIE gateway is installed, its possible to create different scenes for cooking versus entertainment versus night light settings.

Bathroom Smarthome Renovation

Installation of smarthome technology into bathrooms is an often overlooked benefit, and some serious convenience and energy savings strategies can be deployed in bathrooms.

1. Smart timers for heated towel racks to ensure towels are warm and dry at the right time, BUT not left on unnecessarily, saving energy and money.
2. Smart timers switches for extractor fan run-on - Ensuring that heat and moisture is extracted from the bathroom effectively can save your home from costly repairs in the future from water damage and mould. A smart time switch allows the extractor fans to run-on for a pre-set time and turn off to save energy too
3. Smart dimmers for lighting - whether that is overhead downlights, wall lights or LED strip behind mirrors and vanities.

Living Room Smarthome Renovation

The living room is a place to experience smarthome technology and show it off to your friends and family too.

1. Smart dimmers for overhead lights, pendants and floor lamps
2. Smart LED strip kits for indirect lighting and mounting behind TV cabinets, behind TVs and around bulk heads to create that movie-theatre feel with a single button press - this can be RGB (red green blue) or white (3k,4k,5k) or a combination of both 
3. Blind control to add to that movie theatre feel and provide the comfort and privacy afforded by motorised blinds.

Master Bedroom Smarthome Renovation

Getting creative in the bedroom with your smarthome renovation delivers on the smarthome promise of comfort and convenience.

1. Smart dimmers for bedside wall lights, pendants and downlights so you don’t have to get out of bed to turn off the lights.
2. Smart timer switches for staged security lighting
3. Scene control and whole house control ( via voice, mobile apps or wall switches) so you don’t have to go back down stairs or the other end of your home to make sure all of the lights, appliances are off and blinds are closed.

Understanding the Top 4 rooms to renovate in your home with smarthome technology and how not to overcapitalise, provides peace of mind and a simple way to get started small and expand later.