Love It Or List It's Hilary Farr Highlights One Common Feature Change That Can Wipe Out Your Budget During A Renovation

A renovation creates an opportunity to rethink your home's layout. You may want to break down walls to extend or combine rooms, or you might decide to remove a major fixture like a bathtub or a fireplace. Significant moves like these can bring you closer to your vision, but it's worthwhile to figure out how much it will cost first. A fireplace removal, for example, is something that can be very expensive, which is why Hilary Farr decided to make it work in a new space instead.

In one of the homes featured on HGTV's "Tough Love with Hilary Farr," the placement of the living room fireplace made it hard for the family to watch the TV together, but Hilary Farr explained that their masonry fireplace wouldn't be easy to remove and they would have to keep it. She went on to rearrange the room by setting the TV up on the other side of the room and turning the fireplace into a focal point of the room.

The transformed living room now has the TV on a wall opposite the fireplace, where everyone sitting down can see it without craning their necks. "What that allows us to do is to center your seating on the fireplace and turn that into a really fabulous focal point, which it was not before," said Hilary Farr, per YouTube. Instead of having it as an awkward side distraction, she transformed the fireplace to feel like something the room really needed. She added new paint, a new mantle, and some décor pieces, which all cost much less than it would've taken to remove it altogether.

Depending on the fireplace type and the structural modifications required, removing a fireplace can cost up to $10,000. A masonry fireplace, like in the episode, is well-integrated into the structure of the home because it's built right there, unlike a prefabricated one, the complexity of removing it makes it costly. It also leaves a lot of dirt and dust in the removal process, so the labor and cleanup needed can raise the overall costs.

Speaking about the old fireplace, Hilary Farr explained "It was a very puny-looking little fireplace, and it needed to have some presence" (via YouTube). Once you've decided to keep your fireplace, you need to figure out how to revitalize it and make it look new. If your fireplace is in a style you don't like at all, see how you can cover it up to give yourself a better base to work with it. For example, you can cover an old brick fireplace with stone blocks or plaster over tiles.

Now you can design it to fit the room and your tastes. An easy thing to do is to add a fresh coat of paint. If you want the fireplace to make a strong statement, choose a bold color or two or use a patterned wallpaper for the wall around it. If you want your fireplace to fade into the background, just match the color to the walls. Another simple thing that can transform a fireplace is a statement mantel. It adds some definition and texture to the area and provides you with a platform to display some decorative elements.