AIBU to think we can renovate the whole house with £11k

[loopyluloopy]

Just that really,

We want to -
Paint walls
Laminate flooring in 5 rooms and hall way
New full bathroom and new tiles
New internal doors and radiators
Carpet on the stairs

AIBU to think we can do that for all £11k
We are doing the work ourselves, with the help of my FIL.

We get 20% off b&q so this will really help. It's literally just the materials we need to buy. M

When was the house last decorated/done? Will it need a rewire? If very dated I would suggest probably, our current
house hadn't been touched for decades and had never been rewired (built in the 50's). The sockets gave us electric shocks and when they came to rewire found all the cables had crumbled.

If the property is more modern then you might be okay but something to check before you decorate everything!

As a PP said don't just think about the basics, bath, toilet etc. think about everything else, taps etc.

If you aren't hiring any tradesmen then you should be able to work this out by searching for everything you could possibly need and adding up the cost of everything. You can always do it in stages if you can't get everything at once!

Good luck!

Good point re wiring etc
Has it been surveyed? Its sounds unusual to get an older house that doesnt need something big done, like windows, wiring, something plumbing.
Would it be better to energy retrofit it? Heatpump, underfloor heating, radiators, windows etc and increase the energy rating then leave the decorating for later? Its a false economy if you're fitting new floors into a house thats leaking energy and heat and will need to be done anyway in future. But your engineer will advise.

Not a chance you will do this for £11k now even if you DIY everything. You will have to buy lots of stuff that you haven't accounted for like boarding the floors before you put flooring down, screws, glue,wallpaper stripper blades, filler, sandpaper, tools, taps, pipes, plumbing bits, etc. I would pick an order to do stuff in and just pause for a bit when you run out of money. Stripping wallpaper and painting is relatively cheap so you should be able to do all of that. I would focus on painting and doing the bathroom. If you do both of those for 11k you will have done well.

My bedroom is 3.00 x 2.43 / 9'10" x 8'0" so not very big but we recently put laminate down. It was the £9.99 m2 b&q cheapy. For everything required to complete including underlay and a few random things like Stanley knife and tape measure it was less than £200. We did have some underlay left over but that was only about £30 for the full pack. It's the same floor we put in the living room when we moved in back in 2015 which is still looking strong despite heavy usage.

That should give you an idea.

We always get our stuff from b&q and even the bath which was again the cheapest is a solid white simple one that you can't go wrong with. We put fancy taps in.

LVT like Amtico and Karndean is glued down. For this reason, the subfloor has to be 100% level.
I agree that any competent DIYer can fit click flooring whether it's laminate or wood etc. However the fact you're asking about glue shows you may not have come across proper LVT , glue down is standard, and a different ball game altogether.

I personally think 11k is a very tight budget and you'll struggle, everything will have to be the most basic and that's often a false economy.

Trouble with renovating a old house is you often uncover so many unexpected problems. If you have to get the walls plastered , for instance, that's going to add quite substantial costs.

I would also definitely avoid B&Q...their own brand bathroom stuff etc is shocking quality and you can get far better value elsewhere.

In my experience it's the little things that end up taking you over budget, eg underlay/edging floors, pipework in the bathroom, those special tools you have to buy for specific jobs, door handles and hinges etc etc Good luck, I think it's possible (but not easy) on £11k

Only do the painting yourselves if you can achieve a professional finish. Shoddy painting and splashes on light switches etc ruin the look.

I don't think you'll manage even with the lowest spec. You might try looking for used bathroom suites that someone is ripping out on Facebook marketplace etc.

I think it's doable if materials only.

Admittedly a few years ago but materials costs for our bathroom was around 2k

That's bathroom suite, tiles, grout etc. Our tiles were fairly cheap ceramic, but suite and fittings were decent (v&b and hansgroehe) aside from the sink and unit which came from ikea's bargain corner.

All labour done ourselves

I think no.

I moved a year ago, house turned out to be a project I wasn’t ready for (long story) and I’ve spent twice that on even less.

Rando shit I didn’t think I’d need to buy but mounts up:

Various scrapers
paint brushes for different jobs
paint pole
various rollers
heat gun
sander
white spirit
stripper
wire scrapers
sandpaper in different types
wet n dry vac
radiator valves
two types of ladder
welding gloves
two types of face mask and goggles
steam cleaner
masking tape
caulk gun
caulk
tile paint
ceiling paint
bathroom paint
kitchen paint
woodwork paint
electrical sockets
light flex
dust sheets
screwdrivers

and that’s just the stuff off the top of my head that isn’t the actual fixtures and fittings. Plus I’ve had to use tradesmen for the big stuff and my plumber has a £65 call out charge. Plastering five walls, which I hadn’t anticipated when I moved in, cost £1k. A tree surgeon for the trees that presented a danger in a storm was another unexpected £900.

If FIL says he’s doing all the work, you’re beholden to him for actually doing it and you can’t criticise if it’s not the way you want it, or if he goes on holiday and leaves something unfinished, or if he realises he’s bitten off more than he can chew and pulls out, or any manner of things.

Basically, have a plan b.

I’m on about plan Z, and only just starting to see the light.

It depends on the skills of your free labour. If you have a plasterer in your extended family, and ideally someone who does floor fitting, you’ll be right.

Taking wallpaper off walls and ceilings usually reveals areas that need redoing - it’s frequently why they used wallpaper in the first place! We certainly did, to cover elderly plaster walls we couldn’t afford to have skimmed. A bit of self-done patching, a layer of lining paper and wallpaper is much more forgiving than bare walls and pain on older houses.

Have any heavily used areas of flooring done professionally. You’ll probably get away with a DIY job for a bit but in my experience it doesn’t hold up compared with paying a flooring guy for a morning.

That looks really good! Great price!

It's possible, but you'll obviously be looking at the cheaper options for most of your purchases.

@loopyluloopy I think this will be just about doable depending on the materials. I would recommend spending money on things like taps, flooring and a shower screen as they are the things that really notice when they are cheap, and they are also a pain to replace if / when they break.

Kitchen units are all pretty similar, and if fitted correctly can be made to look great, leaving you extra for the doors, soft close hinges, and soft close drawers.

I would recommend seeing if you can get a Selco account as they have better quality materials for a better price than B&Q although your discount will narrow this.

I would also recommend a water softener and an instant boil tap. These have changed my life

In re: stairs carpet, what are your stairs like? We are fortunate enough to have nice wooden stairs, underneath a rather manky 70's carpet cut to imitate a runner. We thought about getting a proper stair runner, but then found you can get pads for the steps only. We plan to sand back and re-stain the stairs when we remove the carpet and use pads, which is going to be much cheaper than either re-carpeting or putting in a runner as we can do the work ourselves. (Could put in a runner ourselves, but not as easy to do).

Obviously not an option if you don't have nice stairs, but worth considering. Only trouble is, if you have carpeted stairs, you have to take it up to look. Ours was badly fitted anyway, so much easier to look.

We paid for an electrical report, all that needs doing is the consumer unit (an upgrade)

Depends how big your house is?

For around that cost I did the below but I had to pay all the labour

Kitchen 3.5k from howdens no appliances
Kitchen 1k fitting
Flooring 1.5k cheap wickes laminate
Flooring 500 to fit (all downstairs done)
Windows (2 x bedroom and hallway) 1600
Bathroom 5000
Garage walls and door 3000 (turned from car port to garage with cladding roof and door)
Blinds throughout plus fitting 500
3 internal doors with handles etc 200
3 internal doors fitted 400
Decorating 100

@hellobl

When did you have this work done? Seems reasonably priced for a kitchen

October 2023. I found a local builder who agreed to fit for 1k, the kitchen came from howdens. Basic kitchen, white gloss. No appliances apart from a hob. I also got the upstands to match the worktops

I think you can if you are really careful about everything. When I was doing up my favourite house I bought a lovely free standing bath and a high end shower and I only used the shower really. I also paid for under cabinet lights I never used.

You need to shop around. I bought carpets here from a local company that were good value. I plan to spend much less on things here.

I do all the decorating myself.

We upgraded our consumer unit in Feb at a cost of 2k. We weren't earthed at all and nobody picked it up until then. Had to get the national grid folk out to earth us as well as electrician. Right palava! Our electrics were estimated to be from the 70s though 🫣, we only lived here 5 years or so. There have been many missed opportunities to pick up that the property had no earth in all that time. We're lucky!