How do people finance home improvements/extensions?

[Yorky]

Not intended to be a personal question but apart from getting a home improvement loan from the bank, remortgaging, possibly equity release (if anyone can explain this to me in layman's terms I would b v grateful, or buying for example a kitchen on the store's buy now pay in x time scheme or selling a small child, how do we find a large lump of cash to finance the home improvements we want to do?

Have I missed anything?

TIA

My mum paid for ours. Sorry :(

TBH if you've got three bedrooms, why not just put bunk beds into the single room? you could save to have the house redone in 20 years when at least one or two of them might have left home?

Our extension has made a massive difference to the house, but the process was so awful I actually wouldn't do it again, and I can't bear to think about the money it cost. Whenever my mother chooses to have a holiday in Devon, I assume that she would be in Brazil if it weren't for us. The extension might as well be called the Guilt Room.

well your options are

1. sell an asset (car, insurance policy, shares, part of your house (essentially what you do when you remortgage))
2. save the money
3. do it out of regular income (hard when the amount you are talking about is 12k).

for the situation you describe - is an extension really going to add the value necessary to pay off? would you be better off moving to a larger house (possibly one that needed smartening up, which could be done gradually out of residual income..)

my current idea is to do just that: buy less nice but larger house and make it nicer...although at the level we're at the costs of moving aren't that prohibitive.

But edless, to move to a larger house generally means increasing your mortgage. What's the difference between increasing it for a move and increasing it for an extension? The experts say that in most cases it's cheaper to extend because there's no stamp duty, solicitors fees and removal costs, on top of the extra mortgage payment.

not all larger houses are more expensive. if your existing house is nicely done, and you buy, say, a larger repossession/ probate property/ something slightly tatty but larger it may cost less than your existing home.

if i extended my house i wouldn't increase the value of the house by the cost of the extension... if i bought a pre-extended house then i could also look for something with features my existing property does not possess (eg, being detached would be nice!) ..it would be a matter of luck in the right thing coming up.

Must be different in different areas then. Round here, even a house that hasn't been updated for 60 years will go for an extra 80 grand at least if it's got an extra bedroom. So for us, to move up to that AND have to upgrade decor all through and upgrade bathroom and kitchen would be much more expensive than staying put and extending what we've got.

Pascha, when you say you have bought house that costs less due to the work needed and then are 'mortgaging up' to the expected value on completion, have you already got the cash to do the work then? We want to do this as we are looking at houses to buy and it would ultimately work out a cheaper option for us (in we would have the house we want and the mortgage including cost of work needed would be less than the bank would lend us for a finished house). However when I've spoken to a couple of banks they said they would only lend against the value of the house as it is now. Unfortunately we won't have enough equity from our current house to set some aside and have a big enough deposit.

We've had another mortgage to do ours - but it is a huge project (adding 3 bedrooms/2 baths/office/porch & utility) LOTS of work with moving electric/plumbing/new kitchen/baths/flooring/welsh slate roof.....oh it goes on & on & on.......

We grovelled at the bank & amazingly they helped us. Now the funds are runnign really low we have to eat into the insurance policies we have going. But its for the home we want & one we will not be moving from so its one heck of an investment.

We were told the same Granary, can only have mortgage for current value of house, so we're hoping the bank will be nice and give us a mionster loan so we can do the work before our 2yr fixed mortgage ends and we look for another one - hopefully on a bigger house then we can remortgage and pay off the loan that way.

Its finding the line bewteen what will give us the extra space we need vs what will make the house too big for the garden or too expensive for the area.

We're in the process of buying a house that needs quite alot of work doing to it but we believe that it has been reflected in the price so we've come in under budget on the actual house price and basically, we're using the mortgage to completely refurbish it. i.e we've bought a siginificantly cheaper property than we can afford but using the extra money to hopefully turn it into the house that we want. (probably seen too many Grand Designs).

We did our house up with a combination of very generous in laws and a remortgage.