With the house you are living in, if maintenance has not been kept up, you may run into expensive repairs.
Your renovations are more personal and you are there while the renovations are going on.
So although you are inconvenienced by the noise and the mess, at least you are there to see how the work is progressing.
With an investment property, it's a bit trickier because you have to meet the contractors at the property and you are not there to supervise the work.
No matter how well you know your contractors, it is always advisable to show up on a regular basis and check out their progress.
Let me give you an example to illustrate this.
I was having a builder put up a partition wall to make the through lounge into two rooms in one of my investment properties.
The room was large enough to divide without sacrificing living space and I was going to make one of the rooms into another bedroom because I knew it would bring in more rental income.
A job that should have taken a few days had already taken three months and, if it weren't for a neighbour telling me that the builder and his men were sitting around on boxes every day drinking tea and smoking for hours on end, they might still be there three years later.
After the neighbour reported this to me, I came to the house every day until the job was finished, pretending to work on different things.
Amazingly, they finished the job a few days after I got there.
There are different ways of looking at property renovations: For the most part, investors look at it as "let's get it fixed up and rented out as quickly as possible.
For the last several years, it was very common for people to buy a fixer-upper house - maybe they went in with two or three others and did their own repairs for a quick turnaround.
Or they got others to do the renovations for them - either way, many people were making money hand over fist.
When property prices are rising quickly, it's easy to make money even if you are a novice.
However, in this economic climate, you cannot turn around properties so easily any more.
If you are investing right now, you will probably have to rent out the property for a few years before you are able to turn in around for a profit.
Therefore, you need to consider the issue of renovations, upgrades and repairs very seriously.
With an investment property, you may want to use low-grade to medium-grade items and materials just so you can get tenants in.
For your own home, you may want to upgrade.
It's a different kind of call when you are doing your own house as opposed to an investment property.
Ask yourself, how much am I going to invest in my property? Am I going to stay there for a long time in which case I might like to get an upgraded bathroom, an upgraded kitchen and nicer appliances.
Also, because it's your own home and you are living in it, you have more time to save up and do the renovations in your own time.
With an investment property, you don't have that kind of time.
You need that property to start bringing in you an income as soon as possible and you want to do it as cheaply as possible, unless you have a luxury investment property where you can get a very good return on your investment.
Then you may want to hire an interior designer to help you make the property as attractive as possible to tenants who will pay a very high rental.
However, if you are going to hire an interior designer, make sure that your builder is willing to work with them.
I hired an interior designer to design the kind of kitchen that would be attractive to a prospective tenant who was going to be paying a high rent.
She came in, made recommendations on cabinetry, counter tops, hardware and flooring.
I was very pleased with the samples she showed me and she gave my builder a list of the things she needed.
Whether the builder was having a bad hair day or he had a hearing loss, or he just didn't like the interior designer, the end result was that everything that she put down on her list was ignored.
She asked for white counter tops of high grade quality and he had substituted a dingy greenish-brown colour of the cheapest grade.
Instead of buying new doors for the cabinets, he gave me second hand doors and wanted to charge me for new doors.
And the knobs - unbelievable as it may seem, he put on knobs that were different colours and sizes that he must have had lying around from other jobs.
They weren't just different colours and sizes but the wrong colours and the wrong sizes and wherever the doors and cabinets didn't fit properly, he cut them down to make them almost fit, but not quite fit.
The lesson I learned from this was that I needed to buy the materials myself - at least then I could be sure that the interior designer's instructions had been adhered to.
To summarise: -Know the difference between renovations on your own home and those on an investment property.
-With an investment property, try to make a point of supervising builders on a regular basis.
If you are not living close by, get someone to check for you and report back to you.
-In the current downturn economy, it's very difficult to buy, fix up and sell a property in a short space of time.
This is only for the professionals, not amateurs.