From Spare Bedroom to Home Office: The "Before" and How to Choose a Tradesperson on Airtasker

NOTE: This is NOT a sponsored post! We did, however, use an Airtasker coupon code to put
towards our project but this is in no way sponsored by the brand or affiliated with the Airtasker brand.

Hellooooo, friends! 

I am a sucker for a good makeover. A personal makeover, a home reno, a room makeover - you name it, I will probably love it. I think it's probably because it appeals to my creative side. I love seeing something taken from drab and boring or outdated to something fabulous. 

I'm hoping that this project will be something fabulous. But I thought, rather than show you a before and after photo - I'd take you along on the journey with us. 

If you follow us on Instagram or read my weekly Recent Things posts, you might have seen these bubble gum pink walls before. They're the walls of my sister's old bedroom - and whilst we started working on turning that room into a home office, we got completely and utterly overwhelmed with the task. 

You see that big hole? The wall wasn't like that before. That side backs onto our kitchen where our old fridge was leaking (again, if you've been here a while - that's the fridge that leaked and caught on fire 😂) so there was moisture in the wall which lead the paint to bubble. 

We knew that meant the paint had to be peeled back - but little did we know that those little bubbles would lead to a huge section of the wall just peeling away. 

And that's where we finished up. 

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We sanded all the woodwork, patched the little holes and we had two big ol' holes staring at us. 

So what did we do? 

We left them... sitting there... for months... 

Literally, that room has just had the door closed and we didn't go in there because we just didn't know where to start. We'd gone to Bunnings and bought the plaster they told us would fix it - but that too overwhelmed us because we had no plastering experience and Jesse and I aren't example extreme home renovators.... we'd fail miserably on The Block because we'd probably just sit in the middle of the room scrolling through Pinterest whilst crying about our inadequacy. 

Actually, Jesse is pretty handy - I'd be doing all the crying and he'd be doing something... 

If you asked me, the whole room was dead. I was D O N E with it all and thought maybe we'd just keep the door closed forever. 

But luckily there are people in this world who are handy and so after months of doing nothing (I'm exaggerating, it was actually only weeks), I got on my computer and pulled up Airtasker.

I'd seen the ads, got the annoying little tune stuck in my head again and again and apparently that song worked because well... I hired an Airtasker-er. 

I found their Hire a Tradesperson page after a google search and put up my ad. I think putting up the ad was the hardest part because I wasn't quite sure what to say - but just in case you're thinking about putting up your own, here's what I said; 

I explained the job as best as I could, gave a rough timeline of how long I thought the job would take and put up a ballpark figure of how much my "budget" was for the project. 

I then had 20 or so different Airtaskers comment and make an offer on the project and after just one day of having the ad up, I decided I had enough people to sort through to choose. The offers I received varied in price - some were well below the budget set for the task, some were way above, some were in the middle - but most were around the $500-600 mark (keep in mind this was with no tools/paint/materials required). 

I sorted through the different offers by looking at their profiles and narrowed down the offers based on; 

• Their history of work on Airtasker
  What kind of work had they completed? What were the comments about the project? What was their completion rate and review rating?
  
  A lot of the people who made offers on the project had only done a few tasks picking up items or putting together IKEA furniture - so they didn't make the cut as I didn't know how well they'd get the job done.
• The photos of their work 
  Did they have photos of similar projects on their profile?
  
  But be careful when looking at the photos. I know how to reverse image search and used that when I noticed one of the people claiming to be experienced and skilled had photos that certainly didn't look right. A quick google image search and that poster had used google images for "landscaping" "painting" "signwriting" and "wall mounting" - yeah, that's a no from me. 
• What were their skills/education/experience? 
  You can find all of this information on their Airtasker account as well.

The Airtasker I ended up choosing was Gengiz V. He was someone who seemed genuine, had completed similar tasks with great reviews and had experience as well. 

He's currently working on the room as I type - so I'll have to give you an update on how it's all going next week!

Hopefully by the time we get back from Hawaii it will be all painted and ready to decorate - so once I share our trip with you, I'll be ready to share the real fun stuff - the decorating!!!!! 

But tell me, 

Do you consider yourself a "handy" person? Are you good at fixing and doing things or would you rather leave it to the professionals like me? 

And what's one room in your house you would LOVE to makeover if you had the chance? 

Even if you're renting - this is a dream opportunity :P