How much to invest in home renovations

bpk101

My partner and I recently purchased our first house (2 bed Victorian terrace in London) and have been slowly renovating the place over the last 6-8months.
As the renovation costs start to add up, I was keen to get some advice on how much we should continue spending on the renovation given a) the ceiling price of the house / area and b) our mid term plans for the property (I see us staying here for 5 years approx).

We never really started out with a fixed budget for renovation, we did have a maximum price we wanted to spend on a house when we we were looking and bought this house for £75k under that price deciding we’d rather invest the difference (well a good portion of it) in renovating this cheaper house in the way we wanted, rather than purchase a house right at the top end of our budget that perhaps wasn’t in the style or layout we liked and inevitably needing to change or update a lot of it anyway.

We’ve had out ups and downs with various trades throughout the project so far but by and large the house is starting to take shape. We still have a bathroom and kitchen refit to go, and we’re hoping to add a loft conversion (if structurally feasible) in a couple of years to make it a 3 bed, so in terms of costs we’re far from done yet and I feel a bit of advice to help me budget the next phase(s) might be wise so I avoid never seeing a return on the improvements we're investing in.

Where should we seek advice, a bank? An estate agent? Elsewhere?

Thanks

Davesnave

I asked for similar advice a few years ago. Our local agent and a manager from another branch came along on slack summer holiday afternoon, ate all our biscuits, swapped local anecdotes for a couple of hours and gave us a few tips about our forward plans.

It was good to get a perspective from those who sell properties like ours all the time, but there was nothing remarkable revealed, just confirmation of where our ceiling price would be and an outsiders' view of our shared driveway, which we're now in the course of altering to a private one. It wasn't giving us problems, so we didn't see it as possible 'issue.'

Our plans were subsequently scaled-down, but a builder was more use than our architect in achieving a better use of space here, cheaper alternatives having been dismissed, when they should have been highlighted.

Our property is a one-off with land, so very hard to price, but there's still a definite upper limit where we'd hit competition from similar-sized period property....and lose!

But this is very far from London and agents here are different, just like everything else. For a standard property, such as the one we used to live in, I'd just use Nethouseprices, or similar, to collect data and I'd try to find a personally recommended, experienced builder for other advice, like your loft conversion.