How can I understand how much renovation costs?

FreeBear

deannagone said: Youtube is second to none for learning DIY skills

The trouble with youtube vids is there is no guarantee that the person doing the vid is an expert. I have come across some where the job being tackled is being done totally wrong - A lot of bad advice there, so you need to be careful.

Picking up on a recent thread over on the DIY section about repointing walls on a 1920s bungalow. If you go on youtube, plenty of "experts" using angle grinders to rake out the joints, and then slapping in cement mortar (sometimes with a gun). The problems - One slip with the grinder, and you make a mess of the brick, and you will slip, more than once. A 1920s building will most likely be a lime mortar, so easy enough to rake out with simple hand tools. Using a lime mortar to repoint with is sympathetic to the building, and essential if it is a solid 9" brick wall. Cement should be reserved for modern buildings.

SensibleSarah

I bought a (liveable) fixer upper with no experience. Nearly 13 years on and I've still not fixed it up. Lack of time, knowledge, money and motivation - plus no possibility of moving out while work is being done, so it's just been put off all this time. I'm happy to admit that rennovations are not for me (clearly) so my advice would be to wait for a recently rennovated option if you can afford to, which it seems you can. 

Windofchange

The location you are buying in will defintely impact upon the cost too. If in London then I reckon a proper doer upper project would easily go north of 100k without you even going over the top with farrow and ball finishes and so on. We brought a Victorian terrace that wasn’t a doer upper, but had certainly seen better days. I’ve done all the work myself as I am certainly competent at DIY / motivated to do so and we’ve spent in the region of 20k so far doing two bedrooms, front room, back room and a new boiler. I’ve done plenty of additional stuff as we’ve gone such as insulating under the downstairs floorboards, but that 20k or thereabouts is just materials for four rooms, and we haven’t gone over the top. 

Thing is, once you start you uncover all sorts of things that it just makes sense to do in one go. Case in point, when I pulled up the carpet in the front room i noticed some of the floorboards looked rotten. Pulled some of them up and noticed the joists had evidence of wood worm infestation and one was pretty much broken. Also thought well whilst I’m replacing all that I may as well replace all the plumbing and electrics in the cavity. Then I replaced the lead mains water supply with MDPE. Then I thought I may as well insulate under the floorboards as the house is freezing in winter. What was a simple Let’s replace the carpet with wood flooring job quickly turned into a few months of labour and a lot of cost. Had I paid a tradesman to do it the bill would have run to 20k just for that room alone I reckon - I also plastered it whilst I was at it as out a new bifold door in. 

I reckon the figure of around 3k per square meter given earlier probably isn’t far off if having tradesmen in, certainly for London. Doing an 80 square meter house and that will get financially painful real quick! 

sheramber

Being impatient, don't buy a fixer upper if you are going to use trades. I could take weeks/months for a tradesman to available- I have just waited 4 months for some work to be done- then there is the time they take to do the job.

Will you need to take time off work to allow them access and oversee what they are doing?That doe not gel well with someone who wants it done and done now.

RHemmings

Thanks for all the extra advice everyone. I laughed when I read @SensibleSarah's post, as that's exactly what would likely happen to me.  

Noneforit999

Buying a fixer upper only really works if you are fairly decent at doing most stuff yourself or you have the money to pay someone to do it all.

Plenty of people buy houses that need to work which they plan to do themselves over a few months after moving in and years down the line, little has changed as life got in the way. It depends on your circumstances and your skill level. For example, if you have no clue how to pull up a carpet and you have 3 small kids running around, I would forget about doing the work yourself. I am reasonably handy at most things but with a full time job and a toddler, there are plenty of things around the house which still need doing.

Paying trades is the easiest option but this assumes you have the money. It really depends on what needs doing.

If you get in and discover it needs a rewire, that not a small task both cost wise and in terms of impact its going to have when they are cutting into walls, dust everywhere, having to live round the mess and trades for the best part of a week. 

A new kitchen? Ours was meant to be 2 weeks according to the builder but took 6. Its hard work being without a kitchen with children needing to eat, living off microwave meals and takeaways gets very boring after a week or so. To give you an example, our kitchen cost (earlier this year 13sqm):

Cabinets and appliances - £11000 (High end to be fair)
Quartz - £2200 (fitted)
Flooring - £1500 (fitted)
Fitting of kitchen - £6000 (ex VAT)
Electrics - £4300 (new fuse box and full kitchen rewire needed)

That is an extreme example, we could have got different cabinets for half that cost and people generally don't need £4k worth of electrics but it depends on the age of the house and if you want stuff moved, we wanted the oven moved the other side of the room and the sockets nowhere near where the existing ones were.

Nobody can give you even a ballpark figure as it depends on what needs doing, the area you live in and what level of quality/finish you want.

Bigphil1474

Worth bearing in mind that houses that might not appear to be fixer uppers may also need a lot of work as well. We bought our house in the 90's and every room needed work on once we started making it our own. Took us a few years to get it to an okay position, and we bought it on the basis that it didn't need much doing. A few simple examples- we decided to redecorate the attic bedroom. Removed the old wallpaper and found that the previous owners had wallpapered over holes in the ceiling that were stuffed with newspaper, and you could see daylight through the roof. The kitchen units looked fine, but one fell off the wall a couple of weeks after we had moved in and started filling it up with our stuff. The plaster was knackered and the fittings had worked loose. 

The best thing you can do for owning a house is learn some basic DIY skills. Wallpapering, painting, prepping floors and walls are all easy DIY jobs. Some small scale plastering/filling is doable with a bit of practise, even basic plumbing and electrical jobs aren't difficult - replace toilet gubbings, replace or fix dripping taps, change plug sockets etc.

Even if you get someone in to do a job like decorating, if you can do all the prep beforehand, you will save money. Learning to use a scraper isn't harder, and neither is ripping old carpets up. We had new carpets fitted to our two sets of stairs and landing earlier this year, and the fitter said it was £150 more if they removed and disposed of the old carpets and prepped the surface for new carpets, so I did it myself. 

FreeBear

Bigphil1474 said:

Worth bearing in mind that houses that might not appear to be fixer uppers may also need a lot of work as well. We bought our house in the 90's and every room needed work on once we started making it our own. Took us a few years to get it to an okay position, and we bought it on the basis that it didn't need much doing. A few simple examples- we decided to redecorate the attic bedroom. Removed the old wallpaper and found that the previous owners had wallpapered over holes in the ceiling that were stuffed with newspaper, and you could see daylight through the roof.

Similar problems here - What starts out as a simple job turns in to a major exercise.

Stripping wallpaper in the box room - Much of it was falling off due to damp issues (condensation rather than leaks). As the wallpaper came off the walls, so did the plaster behind. Ended up taking all the plaster off the walls & ceiling, insulating (75mm Celotex on the walls, an extra 100mm of fibreglass added to the ~200mm already in the loft), and then plastered. No more damp or condensation, and the room is probably the easiest to heat.

Time to remove the artex on the lounge ceiling - [redacted] it. not only is it trying to hide big cracks, but it is also holding some of the plaster in place. Big crack over the bay window (right in the middle), give it a poke to see if there is any movement and whether it is possible to put screws in to secure it. Big lump of plaster ends up on the floor. Taking down the entire ceiling saved on having to strip artex off and patch up cracks.

Lets get rid of the woodchip paper on the ceiling on the landing & hallway - Yup, paper is hiding yet more cracks and holding plaster up. Also find a crack in the stairwell wall that one can see daylight through. After stitching the crack, insulating another wall, and putting up yet more plasterboard, the wallpapering is done. Whilst taking the plaster off the ceiling in the hallway, heard a loud thud in the dining room. A big chunk of plaster has come down in there, so I either patch it now, or redecorate that room next.

Currently on year eight of a two year redecorate that has turned in to a full renovation.

Noneforit999

Bigphil1474 said:

The best thing you can do for owning a house is learn some basic DIY skills. Wallpapering, painting, prepping floors and walls are all easy DIY jobs. Some small scale plastering/filling is doable with a bit of practise, even basic plumbing and electrical jobs aren't difficult - replace toilet gubbings, replace or fix dripping taps, change plug sockets etc.

Even if you get someone in to do a job like decorating, if you can do all the prep beforehand, you will save money. Learning to use a scraper isn't harder, and neither is ripping old carpets up. We had new carpets fitted to our two sets of stairs and landing earlier this year, and the fitter said it was £150 more if they removed and disposed of the old carpets and prepped the surface for new carpets, so I did it myself. 

Yep, few people are incapable of learning some basic DIY skills. Myself and my father in law replaced all the radiators in our house, most of them needed pipe work altering too. I was going to pay a plumber to do it and he gave me a 'don't be daft, I have done loads of plumbing jobs at home over the years' look so we did it ourselves. Granted, it probably took twice as long but saved my quite a bit of money and now I have most of the tools (and a chunk of knowledge) if I need to do anything again.

One thing I will be teaching my son is to do stuff himself where possible, you can't put a value on teaching the younger generation to do some basic DIY and maintenance around the house. I have friends who are not even sure how to put a drill bit into a drill! 

You mention carpets. Its surprising what people want these days, I was going to skip our old carpers but I listed them for free on Facebook Marketplace and someone came and got them. If you have several rooms of carpet to dispose of, it may make more sense to pay the firm to do it but if you can get rid of them yourself then I wouldn't bother. Its not the ripping up, its the getting rid that normally the issue. 

Note - Some jobs around the house legally require a qualified person like gas and some electrical stuff so please get a professional in for these. 

Gavin83

Noneforit999 said:

Bigphil1474 said:

The best thing you can do for owning a house is learn some basic DIY skills. Wallpapering, painting, prepping floors and walls are all easy DIY jobs. Some small scale plastering/filling is doable with a bit of practise, even basic plumbing and electrical jobs aren't difficult - replace toilet gubbings, replace or fix dripping taps, change plug sockets etc.

Even if you get someone in to do a job like decorating, if you can do all the prep beforehand, you will save money. Learning to use a scraper isn't harder, and neither is ripping old carpets up. We had new carpets fitted to our two sets of stairs and landing earlier this year, and the fitter said it was £150 more if they removed and disposed of the old carpets and prepped the surface for new carpets, so I did it myself. 

Note - Some jobs around the house legally require a qualified person like gas and some electrical stuff so please get a professional in for these. 

AFAIK there isn't any electrical job (bar maybe some extremely specialist stuff) that you can't legally do yourself. However there are a number of jobs that need certifying which would typically be done by a professional but there is nothing technically stopping you from doing it yourself and getting the council to sign it off. However the scope of the work you can do without this sign off is actually quite large.

I'd even question the definition of a professional too. My dad is now (recently) retired but he was an electrician for 40+ years. He'd do as good a job, if not a better one than the "professional" I'd get in to do it. However his work would be treated the same as mine and would still need sign off by the council. You don't even need to be a good electrician to sign off your own work, you just need to be a member of a trade body.

I believe the only work you aren't actually allowed to do yourself is anything related to gas and some plumbing work.

I do agree with the concept that you're best off learning to do as much as possible yourself though. Some of the work I've seen done by "professionals" is shocking. At least if I do it myself I know it's done right or even if it isn't at least I've only got myself to blame. I reckon I've saved £20k-£30k over the last few years having done the work myself.

On a final note I'll agree with some of the others. Unless you're planning on doing a fair portion of the work yourself I'd consider skipping the purchase of a doer upper. It'll almost certainly cost you more than just buying a renovated house, although you'll lose some of the customisation.