To want to spend money on the house

[MizzyDazzy]

My husband and I really wanted to move, but have decided to stay put for the next 5yrs largely due to schools. We’ve both fallen out of love with our hose (it was always meant to be a stop gap) but now we are staying I want to at least like it / have it be as nice as it can be.

So I’ve said if we’re staying I want to spend money on the house, we’re due to remortgage and can borrow £30k to do the work and I have £10k saved to put towards it. Without touching other savings so we wouldn’t exactly be pushing ourselves. We’re cutting the mortgage term too and can still easily afford the additional £30k to borrow - we’ll have paid off the car so our monthly outgoings would be the same.

No major work like extensions, or even taking a wall out - but I’d like to do the driveway, new floor downstairs and worktops in the kitchen. Whole house needs repainting and a few other bits like swap my son’s room and guest bedroom to create a proper study. Will involve buying new furniture too.

My husband is a builder so would do / organise most the work.

I want to spend the full £40k and possibly more to do everything ‘properly’. For example, we did an extension years ago and cut some corners ie a smaller patio than I’d like, didn’t put some internal doors on, didn’t buy any furniture for the spaces just got what we could / used old as we were on a budget. Then we never finished everything as my husband needed to go back to earn money so never got a second coat of paint on some rooms. And it shows. I’ve never felt anything was finished and the garden is a mess.

I know if we don’t finish everything now the same thing will happen again, so I want to do everything now.

My husband just wants to do a lick of paint and cut corners again where we can. He says “it costs too much” but admits we can do it in the budget. So then he says he doesn’t see the point of spending that if we are moving in 5yrs and that he “doesn’t want to do the work”.

We’ve just had a big row about it as I said I hate the house and he stormed off. Am I being unreasonable / a bit silly to insist we do everything ‘properly’?

For all those saying do it yourself, when and how? If you have children and work full time or even part time you would still need to set aside the time for the children to be looked after by someone, move furniture, protect the flooring etc. Then the prep work, washing walls, filling holes, sanding and then painting.

A decorator can do this during the day time, would be quicker and is skilled. Bad paint jobs look awful. I am a competent DIYer and I do all the decorating.

This is not just a house but a home and you are living in it for the next 5 years. It might be that you stay in the house longer for whatever reason so I would pay to get things done to make it feel more homely. It is miserable living in a house you dislike, I have been there. This isn't just black and white investing, this is living in a space so move the rooms round, decorate it and do things like the driveway too. All of it is adding to the property.

Driveway - yes do
Kitchen - this is a nice to have, wait till new house
Playroom - why is a new floor needed? Rugs to hide old floor is cheaper. Loads cheap or free second hand (eg Facebook Marketplace), ditto sofas. Could do this for a couple of hundred tops
Living room furniture and curtains - again second hand. I got beautiful Laura Ashley curtains, perfect fit, from Vinted, £25 instead of £400!
Stair - sounds like a job you can do yourself at weekends
Fire doors - how many do you need at that price?! I got mine two years ago from B&Q for £125 each and painted them myself. could have got them second hand if I’d thought of it, too, loads get given away by people doing up their houses
Sons bedroom - furniture and curtains get second hand, don’t bother with new carpet, just clean it and put down a rug to hid the damage, and do the painting yourself
Dining room - reupholstering is expensive, are these sentimentally important chairs? If they just need recovering get fabric and do it yourself. If actual reupholstering is needed, it’s cheaper to replace them
Bathroom - fair enough replacing damaged floor, can your husband do that one job at weekends?
Garden - stick to what you can do yourself, maybe get a gardener for a couple of days to help with the initial hard work, thousands for landscaping when you want to move is daft, and ditto new patio
Scaffolding for painting the outside - fair enough
New furniture for guest room and office - again second will be cheap or free!

Honestly you should be able to get it done, and well, with the costs of the drive and scaffolding, for £10k not £40k!

I wouldn’t be spending a lot on furniture as it’s not likely to fit in a new house. Although we’ve taken furniture from one house to another it has rarely looked good as it’s not been bought to fit.
Im not a builder but some of the estimates seem expensive.

Very few people pay the asking price or above the asking price. Offers of 800k are reasonable no matter what your house looks like. Selling and buying houses is usually a negotiation.

You keep conflating 'work' with 'stuff'.

Extending your mortgage to buy furniture is nuts.

And your figures make no sense. How much of this £40k is actually on work...half? So you think spending £20k on the house is going to whack £50k on the price? Mmm.

Kitchen could wait, it’s probably our biggest question mark, but my husband wants to do it too.

14 doors, hence the budget.

They are sentimental chairs (trust me I’d love to bin them!) but they’re my late MIL’s and mean a lot to my husband. Buying new is not cheaper anyway, we did sense check this.

The cost is for material alone, not labour. I’ve probably overstated that one though. Maybe £1k for blind and tiles.

the only labour will we be paying for is kitchen and driveway to help my husband, as well as using his plasterer and decorator as it’s more cost effective then doing it than my husband doing it and not earning. But we have to factor in my husband not earning while he’s doing the work and covering bills.

On your point re furnishings / furniture, that’s jus it - my point is we have always done second hand / make do and mend as we thought we would move and now that’s not happening for at least five years I would like furniture I actually like and doesn’t look an absolute state. Plus it can come with us.

Exactly this! Thank you.

And yes I have a feeling we will end up being here longer as well then be trapped by senior school!

I cant see how you would get ot back bit i would be saying you want to do it then you physically do it yourself

Sure your husband is a builder but I wouldn't want to do my job at home when I get home so why assume he would want too?

I would still look at second hand - Im
always shocked by the low costs these days! I got several gorgeous Ercol pieces on FB for a few hundred, when at the antiques centre they would have cost that each, and I got them for less than £300 total. It takes a bit more time and effort, but honestly, I saved so much! Looking at costs of new vs what I paid it would have been even more, and it’s still exactly what I wanted

I’m not really bothered about it adding value to the house nor expecting it to. Other people have said that it won’t as a reason for this being nuts and I think it will make it sell more easily even if not for more.

I hate my house, but it could be lovely if it was decorated with nice furniture. I’m stuck here and would like to like it while I am.

I have a tiny mortgage and can easily afford to borrow this money while still having 75% equity in my house.

also I’m not borrowing all of the £40k, some is savings.

I’m not sure if you’re talking about painting, but neither of us are considering doing that ourselves. It makes more sense for us to pay someone.

@MizzyDazzy we ploughed money into a house then the market crashed and so when we sold it we never made back all the money we had invested. We saw a loss from that but the house sold for more than we had bought it.

However, we knew it was a stepping stone house to get into catchment of an incredible primary and always knew we would move for a bigger house. We thought we would be there for 4 years but it was longer due to the crash.

I was not prepared (and neither was Dh) to live with green carpets, knotty pine bannister and spindles, embossed fruit tiles in the kitchen with round sinks you couldn't put a baking tray in. We made it our own because we had to look at it day in, day out. Plus we enjoyed the process of choosing new things and the joy at ripping out the shitty stuff we hated.

Considering the valuation of your house it is a small percentage cost wise.

I’m in my forever house and I would like one thing added to make it perfect. Cost £20,000. I’m still at the no fecking-way stage!

Spending £40,000 on a house you don’t love that has a 5-year time limit. Absolutely not.

In your shoes I’d be looking at cost effective and acceptable options.

My comparison of a current situation in my home with yours: our bathroom needs some work, but in the longer term we’re going to rip out the bath and put a deep sitting bath with a shower beside it.

This means spending the absolute minimum on maintaining the bathroom in its current state. The paint is peeling behind the sink (one day it will be ripped out and replaced) so we’ve bought some (appropriate for the space) stick on tiles.

repainting = £300 minimum whereas the stickers were only £3!

Sounds very similar to us - this was meant to be a stepping stone but we love our kids school and we want to move too far to get them back there! We could move now to another place nearby and then move again to where we really want to be, but then would throw £50k away on stamp duty twice! So I guess in my head making this somewhere I actually want to live (and enjoy picking all the bits as you say) feels better than that!