How much did your complete house renovation actually cost you?

[Tapson]

I appreciate AIBU probably isn't the most relevant place to post but am posting here for the traffic.

We are in London, and about to offer on an Edwardian house (2000ish sq feet or 200 sq metres in size). It's beautiful, and perfect for us, but almost crumbling down!

I am meeting some surveyors/builders next week to gauge costs of gutting and knocking out ground floor walls, complete renovation, but we are also keen to bid as the sellers have had another good offer.

So my question is, if you are in London and have renovated a similar sized Victorian/Edwardian terrace, what did you end up spending? In planning fees, architects, project manager, builders, everything?

This particular house needs a new roof, and has damp, cracks in lots of walls, and just hasn't been touched in 30-40 years. Replastering, rewiring, plumbing - it would all have to be done.

The biggest part would be opening up the ground floor which is currently 3 rooms so lots of steels involved.

Thanks in advance for any insight/advice on such a project!

I forgot to say, I am currently thinking about a year for all the planning/building regs/work to be done, and about £250,000 costs.

How reasonable is this, and if you've done something similar, did you have any horrible surprises that you needed a large contingency fund for?

As a chartered engineer, all i can say is 'it depends'. Unhelpful i know, but the cost is going to depend on how quickly you want it done, the standard of finish you want, degree of 'crumbling' and what unexpected things you encounter along the way.

Good to hear you've thought about a contingency, I'd allow at least 20% for a renovation.

Also, be mindful that the market is picking up so you may find you have to pay slightly more than if you'd done it a year ago.

PS. Would strongly recommend you get an engineer to look at opening up the ground floor. Builders may talk about steels to support the floor but there are also stability issues.

Lots of terraced houses have had all the ground floor walls taken out leaving not much to stop them swaying. An engineer can assess whether you need a steel 'picture frame' to stop this.

only about £12,000 but that was just materials, we did the work ourselves apart from some major plumbing. DH done all the plastering, flooring, sanding, kitchen and bathroom fitting and even removed the asbestos from the fireplace himself. Its the way we always do it.

Thank you Manderley - yep 'it's depends' is the scary part as we'd be stretching ourselves to do it. I would allow a 50,000 contingency though.

The house is on a slight hill so the 'picture frame' steels you mentioned may well come into it.

Amazing xcountry. My DH would love to do lots of it himself too but he works abroad most of the time making it impossible. And this particular project is definitely beyond his skill set with all the structural and roof issues!

Same as XCountry- we did it all ourselves apart from the electrics (and thats because it's law now).

All in all it cost us about £20k- we used lots of second hand materials etc where we could. We got a bathroom suite from a family friend who owns a hotel- he gave it to us for £800 and had set him back over £6k 2 years before and it had hardly been used.

Ok we did not do it all ourselves! We have turned a wreck of a three bed terrace into a lovely five bedroom with original features (fireplaces, floorboards, windows, coving) in places and a contemporary clean look and feel.

It has probably cost us £100-110K. It would have been less but we have had to do it in stages.

Luckily our house has been valued more than the cost of the work plus purchasing price so it has been worth it. And it's a lovely place to live.

Things that went wrong:

• Walls that were flimsy crap needed to be rebuilt
• The foundations had fallen down in the kitchen
• The kitchen floor was flooded and ruined by previous tenants
• All the airways to the house were blocked by dirt

.....etc etc etc.

Still, by the last section of work, we were veterans. Our builders complimented us on being super organised and decisive; and we found it a lot less stressful as we knew how building jobs worked. Even as I saw huge holes in my gorgeous new walls and original Victorian banister, I managed not to freak out as I knew it would all work out in the grand plan.

That's exactly the kind of project we'd be taking on Ruby. How much did you originally think you'd spend, before the things that went wrong?

Did you live in the house while doing the works?

Couldn't you at least have posted in Chat if you wanted a high traffic topic?

The biggest pain in the rear for us was the lead piping, we did all electrics and rewiring ourselves too but the whole house was plumbed with lead pipes so had to get someone in for most of that. That and the fact that the cast iron bath needed to be sledgehammered out (by god was that fun) and the chimneystack needed repair once we knocked through the false wall to find soot everywhere.

It makes a considerable impact on the budget if you get people in, Time and labour costs outweigh materials a lot of the time and theres always something that doesn't quite go to plan so you end up spending more time and money to put it right too.

Does it really matter sauce?

We spent around 20k on a 3 bed terrace. We knocked a wall down but it wasn't structural. Painting we did ourselves but builders did most of the other work, and some of the painting.

Asking how much is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string. Without seeing the property it is ompossi to have an idea.

Sorry Tapson - missed your reply.

We didn't really know how much it would cost. We did it in chunks so we thought - oh this bit will cost £20K and then it cost £30K. This bit will cost £40K and then it was £50K.

The only guide we had was our selection of quotes so we had a pretty good idea what was top whack for a piece of work and then what was super budget. That way we could assess where we were going to go over budget (for wooden sash windows as didn't want PVC ones, say) and where we could make savings. The end figure ended up being sort of irrelevant - we just did everything by what it was worth to us.