Funding home improvements

soxford

Hi,
We've been in our house for a number of years and now we need more storage space. I've long wanted to sort out the downstairs - new kitchen, turn conservatory into a proper extension (it's not usable - south-facing garden so hot in summer, freezing in winter!), door in to the garage from the inside, downstairs WC if feasible, make garage into decent utility/storeroom. No idea of the costs involved and certainly not about how people go about raising the funds to do it. No one usually has thousands sitting there to do this sort of work do they?

Would anyone be able to share tips or the process they went through in raising funds and getting ideas of what could be done with the space? Really have no idea, newbie here! It might be that we have to think about this in stages and the priority has to be the garage being turned into a utility/storeroom accessible from the inside.

Thanks!

macman

Personal loan, remortgage, interest free credit card? The usual options, basically. You won't find many builders who want to give you credit for thousands of pounds of work, so you either need to borrow, or start saving.

onomatopoeia99

soxford wrote: »

No one usually has thousands sitting there to do this sort of work do they?

I do, but I've made a major effort at saving for the last decade.

If you don't have a lot of savings, then for big improvements to the house you can try increasing the mortgage, provided you are not already full stretched financially.

Make a list of the things you want to do and then put them in order of priority. You are talking tens of thousands with that lot, possible planning permission for some of it, definite building regs for others.

You can mitigate the cost by doing some things yourself. You just need to be patient, methodical and persistent to do a lot of DIY jobs. Some are a dark art (plastering) or require qualifications (gas, electricity if you don't want to pay for a building regs inspection), but many things like tiling, painting, plumbing etc are entirely doable by an amateur.

SuzieSue

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

I do, but I've made a major effort at saving for the last decade.

So did I. I wouldn't borrow for non-essential work. Keep saving until the you have the money. If you have lived with your house as it is for this long then you can live with it until you have saved up the money to pay for non-essential improvements.

If you borrow money you will have to pay it back anyway and you will be paying interest on it at the same time.

If you can increase your mortgage for a low fixed rate then it might be worth doing but even then I would prefer to use savings.

soxford

Thank you both for your responses. I should mention that we've never had to remortgage, take out a loan, if we've had a credit card it's been for a purpose, used and paid off within the interest free period. So these things are new to us really, and I have no idea if it is feasible in this age of affordability checks etc. I suppose I was looking for other people's experiences of the overall process, I'm not too sure where to start. Speak to the bank first by the sounds of it. I fully expected at the very least that the funds have to be there before any work can start.

To buy our house we saved for several years to get a decent deposit and have been overpaying the mortgage in the 7 years we've been here to get it down, while also trying to pop a bit into savings. We've had a child since then so not so much to put away in savings these days, so no we don't anticipate ever having thousands of pounds squirreled away to necessary work, such is the cost of living these days! I suppose we could stop overpaying and put it into savings instead, though it isn't much a month, until now it seemed a bit pointless with the rates being so dire.

Just wanted to make sure I didn't come across as someone who wants it all and hasn't been patient or willing to save!

goodwithsaving

Save, do it later. You'll have to watch the pennies eventually if you had done it on 0% finance, with the extra pressure of not being able to miss payments etc.

soxford

I appreciate what you are saying, I really do. I'd love to do it with cash. But how on earth would we ever save that much up within a reasonable timescale?? We need the storage space now and the kitchen will be in bits before we ever have the cash there to spend. Ten years ago, when we were full time, renting, hand-me-down appliances etc we could stash £1k a month sometimes, it was a lovely place to be. That was our house deposit. Fast forward to now and everything costs a heck of a lot more, plus one child with the associated childcare costs. If we put away what we overpay on the mortgage then maybe there'd be a couple of hundred a month, but it sounds like our lad will have flown the nest before we ever have the means to do it with cash which rather defeats the purpose. We really aren't a family who like all the trimmings and luxuries, on two incomes it really shouldn't be this difficult to save up and plan ahead. Strange old world... I'll have to sit down and have a think about where we can cut back (again).

SuzieSue

soxford wrote: »

I appreciate what you are saying, I really do. I'd love to do it with cash. But how on earth would we ever save that much up within a reasonable timescale?? We need the storage space now and the kitchen will be in bits before we ever have the cash there to spend. Ten years ago, when we were full time, renting, hand-me-down appliances etc we could stash £1k a month sometimes, it was a lovely place to be. That was our house deposit. Fast forward to now and everything costs a heck of a lot more, plus one child with the associated childcare costs. If we put away what we overpay on the mortgage then maybe there'd be a couple of hundred a month, but it sounds like our lad will have flown the nest before we ever have the means to do it with cash which rather defeats the purpose. We really aren't a family who like all the trimmings and luxuries, on two incomes it really shouldn't be this difficult to save up and plan ahead. Strange old world... I'll have to sit down and have a think about where we can cut back (again).

Well, if the kitchen is in bits then that is essential expenditure and you will need to borrow for that if you don't have enough savings. It is good overpaying your mortgage but not if you need the cash for essential things.

I replaced my kitchen about 8 years ago because I had the savings to do it not because I had to do it. If you have to do it because it is unusable then that is different.

What do you need storage space for? An extension is going to cost tens of thousands and most people can't do it unless they inherit money or increase their mortgage. That's why most people put up a cheap conservatory but as you have found it is impractical to use.

jpsartre

soxford wrote: »

But how on earth would we ever save that much up within a reasonable timescale??

If you can't save up the required money how are you going to be able to pay it back? We've just taken out a small loan (£5000) to pay for a new bathroom but we can pay it back over a 2 year period. It's going to cost us about £200 in interest which I think is pretty cheap.

marc81

We're in the middle of a c.£28k extension at the moment. For the majority we added it to our mortgage but we couldnt get all that we needed as it took us past the 90% max ltv so the remainder was done through a loan. We went through Tesco who offer 3.3% for between £7500 & £15000 which I though was pretty good. Once the work is done and we come to remortgage I guess due to the increase in value of the house the LTV will be less so we may be able to add the loan to the mortgage but I might not bother as it's not a massive amount of money and the loan rate is already good.

Good luck.

marc81

jpsartre wrote: »

If you can't save up the required money how are you going to be able to pay it back? We've just taken out a small loan (£5000) to pay for a new bathroom but we can pay it back over a 2 year period. It's going to cost us about £200 in interest which I think is pretty cheap.

The OP may have no issues paying it back comfortably over say 5 years, but they may not want to wait 5 years to have the work done!