If you have done major house refurbishment - what worked well, and what do you wish you hadn't bothered to do?

[TheEternalOptimist]

We have bought a small terraced house in Scotland. It is in pretty good condition but does need a fair bit of work.

1. New windows - anyone got a recommendation?

1. New boiler - currently electric storage heaters. Possibly interested in wood burning stove in living room, and gas central heating

1. New flooring - real wood for living room and hall. Tiles for kitchen. Again looking for recommendations.

1. Bathroom and kitchen - any recommendations?

1. Remove wall between dining and living room, make one double door instead of 2 individual doors.

1. Garden - needs completely redone. I would like dry stone walls, but not sure if they are going to be really expensive.

One thing we were wondering about, is whether there are any kind of grants available when installing new windows/gas heating etc (energy saving).

We are hoping to do most of the work next year and then re-mortgage at some point to spread the costs.

If you have already done major work on your house - what do you regret? What works really well, and what was a waste of money?

Feel free to share bright ideas :o

If you don't put a door on the kitchen, aren't you going to spend a lot of time in the hall, waving a tea towel at the smoke alarm and swearing?

...just me?

I thought of no door on the kitchen...and then I thought about what if I wanted to sear a nice piece of steak or sea bass (OK so very rare - the searing that is not the steak...more medium rate tbh - but you never know). So not only waving teatowels at smoke alarms - also going upstairs with a lingering smell of char -grilled bits....

we're coming to an end of a huge refurb now (taken 2.5 yrs & thankfully we don't live in the property!)

We have a woodburner - does not heat the water as that would take all day with the sixe of the inglenook. We have LPG firing the boiler. Heated towel rails in the bathrooms.

Good quality laminate to the living/dining room, vinyl to the bathrooms, kitchen & utility. laminate to the kids bedrooms (easy to clean) & carpet to ours.

New windows & doors bought from Heritage Trade Frames & fitted by a chap who was in the trade.

Kitchen from B&Q - walnut shaker style. Didn't want oak style cos everyone has it & its boring (only my opinion). Black metro tiles instead of an upstand as I really didn't want to wipe bolognaise marks off my walls!

Dry stone walling is expensive (we had them done for the small holding about 5 yrs ago & it cost about £70-£90 per metre in length. We have to have the same done now to the entrance of the cottage & thankfully its only about 5 meters in length. We'll have a small patio in the centre of the garden them slate waste round it & for parking. Much cheaper than laying loads of slabs/tiles and its inkeeping with the surrounding landscape (slate quarries).

Oh and double your loft insulation if you can. We have & the house still isn;t quite finished & its warm!

Oh & just to give you an extimate for the windows we paid less than £5000 for 2 composite doors & 13 windows. Paid the fitter what he wanted in cash - £400. Bargain!

forgot to mention I got my bathrooms from Grahams Plumbers Merchant - did a bit of flirting with the nice chap & got £200 off the price!

Try it!

1. New windows. Did that throughout. They are a godsend but I wish I had not economised with UPVC and gone for solid hardwood.

1. New boiler. Done that times two. We've split the system now. The boiler does all the radiators and downstairs, the combi does upstairs. Which is great in terms of always having hot water.

1. New flooring. Done that. Oak flooring throughout downstairs is a godsend for small children and looks nice. DO NOT ECONOMISE WITH LAMINATE. i did that with one room downstairs and it looked so horrible that I ripped it out a year later. False economy.

1. New bathroom. Done that times four. The way that works for me is to do it the hard way - i.e rather than a bathroom company, think about what you want and source the items and find a local plumber to fit. We have slate floors and marble walls in all the bathrooms. Looks lovely. Have contrasting floors rather than all over the same colour (we did that with one bathroom and it was a mistake) Go wild with the plumbing. We were a bit too conservative in terms of shower jets.

1. New kitchen. Done this as well. Do not compromise too much is all I can say. I compromised and had a fitted fridge/freezer (rather than a huge fridge, which is what we needed) and also compromised with four rings on the cooker (rather than six rings, which is what we needed). You'll need to go and get quotes and stuff. One compromise I don't regret is having laminate worktops rather than granite. Get some quotes, try local tradesmen, make sure you do more work rather than less in terms of sourcing stuff.

1. Garden - again go for what you want.

WRT the flooring; we have stripped floorboards in some rooms, good quality laminate in others. My mother has a good phrase for the wood floor rooms - "Your heart will be broken".

Seriously, any furniture with feet, walking on it in heels, kids with wheeled toys, dropping your car keys = massive damage to wood floor. Bounces off laminate. Suppose it depends how careful you are (and how many kids/pets you have).
Also consider engineered wood flooring, or Karndean/Amtico (warmer underfoot, doesn't have that telltale laminate sheen, harder to gouge chunks out of).

solar panels: we have done this, but there was a time limit for the best government subsidy which has now passed, so it will take you a long time (10 years?) before you get back what you have spent in energy savings. Also only worth it on south facing shade free roof. Doesn't recoup any money when you sell, not seen as a selling point.

worksurfaces: my brother has corian, and says it is amazing, has turnups and splashbacks and doesn't stain at all, any marks just come off with flash, even lily pollen stains. I don't like the plastic look of them, but my mum has beautiful wooden ones, and they mark, and go horrible round the sink and need lots of tlc.
Ikea kitchens have 25 year guarantee apparently. The cost of kitchens is often the cupboard cases, which don't vary much from one make to another, so you can buy cheaper kitchen (like Ikea) and then add the doors you like. Much cheaper than whole kitchen from expensive supplier.

bathroom/kitchen: If you tile, buy an extra box and leave them in the loft/garage. There is nothing more annoying than having to make a minor change in a few years and not having any matching tiles (grits teeth at previous owners who didn't leave even ONE spare tile - and I only need 2 - thus meaning we will have to completely re-tile bathroom, just to move basin and put over the bath shower...)

wooden floor. My mum had sanded boards that were then professionally stained/polished. Looked really fab, didn't scratch, but she was obsessive about wet spills.

downstairs shower is waste of space (who uses a downstairs shower if there is one upstairs) downstairs loo is essential.

wood burning stove: I am desperate for one, and have looked at getting one. We were really surprised at the legal requirements for the space around them. You need a hearth that sticks out 30(?) cms past the end of the door when it is open. This would mean an enormous hearth sticking into our room. I am sure most people don't have this, but suppliers wouldn't fit one that didn't come up to speck. (now trying to persuade dh to build fireplace onto outside of house and knock through..)

Hello Champagne. This is fab. Now I have someone to moan to about the bloody builders and how I wish we hadn't started this :o

Garlic
One thing I wondered about - the cheaper units don't always have the best fittings, eg the drawers with the soft close mechanism. Do B&Q do a premium range with this?

DF
If it is really bad, we can move in with my parents for a bit. Don't really want to though, so it will be last resort.

Boulevard/Fishfingers
hmm, yes. Good point. I thought I might take the door off the kitchen now until we start on the renovations to test that. Saying that, if I do burn something, then I find opening all the windows wide and letting air flow through works well to dispense the smell. Not that I burn stuff. No no.

Yankee
Laminate only an option for the bedrooms, and that only if we run out of money. My parents have it and I am not keen on it. Engineered wooden floors seem to be a good compromise though.

The wall is only about 5 or 6 meters so perhaps I will go for the dry stone wall. It is quite far down the list though.

Hopefully
Good tip on the bathroom. I am quite fussy so that would be good.
We have a friend who is a great kitchen planer (but doesn't live and work in UK) so we shall ask him to plan the kitchen to my specifications. I love to cook so won't compromise on that.

Wondering if I really need a double oven though. We had it in the last house, but rarely used both at the same time.

Steppe
Idea with downstairs shower is that one person can shower while other is in bath or on loo. We have been spoiled the past few years, that we had extra bathrooms. Although, when I think about it, we didn't really use both bathrooms at the same time very often. Might scrap that and put the washing machine / tumble drier in there.

yy to box of tiles. Hate it when people don't do this, cause then you cannot replace a broken tile.

Yes, I had soft close drawers from B&Q. I got a beech Shaker-style jobbie with frosted glass bits. They were actually made of pear wood with beech on top - never could work out why they don't just do pear wood doors, but still!

I wanted a divider with cupboards under, sort of like an island but narrower. I bought wall cupboards for this as they're not so wide; carpenter made them come up the same height as the floor units and fashioned a length of worktop to the shape I wanted. He was a genius :) Instead of B&Q worktop, he made mine from solid beech - though I'd go for plastic now ... or Noddy's reclaimed glass. He also cut down some tall units to about 4" depth, which went around the oven housing (I'd set the oven into a disused chimney). These were fantastic for spice jars and suchlike - no disappearing to the back of the shelf.

Have you asked any local brick suppliers about old stock brick from your area? It's going to be cheaper than stone, unless you happen to be living on a stone dump, and will blend with the local vernacular. More versatile, too.

Double oven is a matter of taste, I guess. I need one! My reasoning, however, is crap - I can have big stuff on slow in the big oven and frozen chips on high in the smaller one On a slightly less common note (dahling) I used to have people over for dinner a lot, and the double oven was essential. Without that, you end up microwaving things that shouldn't really be nuked ime.

Course, now I'm broke and using a flaky second-hand oven, practically everything goes in the slow cooker. It's true you don't need 90% of the things you 'need' but they still make life a whole lot pleasanter! It's just lovely to create a home for the life you're going to live in it :)

You asked what people wouldn't do again? Well, leaving out "let my ex walk all over me during the divorce", I regret living in the place during a complete refurb. It was horrendous and I ended up spending too many nights in a nearby hotel. With the previous living-in-whilst-knocking-down place, we stayed with nearby friends for several weeks during the worst part. Failing an alternative home to hide out in, I'd think about renting a caravan or something. I also had to make heavy use of launderettes and the showers at the gym. Brick dust is the filthiest, most invasive kind of dirt. It gets into vacuum-sealed storage bags, everything.

That sounds good, Garlic. Will check out local carpenters.

My parents live about 2 mins away so we can decamp there if need be. It is v handy cause it means even if we move out during the build, I will still be close enough to keep a good eye on it.

Will check out brick suppliers, but would prefer the traditional dry stane dyke, that we have in pretty much every field around here.

Hurray for parents round the corner!

FGS, don't nick a wall for your garden. It must be tempting ...

Garlic
they'd hardly miss a few stones ;)

Anyone know what this is called in English? Roemischer Verband - a style of laying tiles so that they are not in straight lines. A friend in Germany had this done and DH says it is stunning.

Is this it?

It's like "French farmhouse" tiling but I think your example was slightly different.

Here's a good tile patterns page :)

oh, damn. I can see I am going to spend many hours deciding on the pattern of tiles that I want.

Here lies madness.

If you're tiling a squarish space, laying tiles diagonally (no pattern) does a great visual trick - the eye assumes the space is larger than it is. It doesn't work so well on oblong floors, although the Victorian method of tiling in diamond shapes does. True diagonals should be measured from corner to corner. For diamonds, you just set the tiles at 45°.

I do like those varied-size patterns you mentioned. They look somehow friendly :)

I think it is most similar to the first one yuo linked to, the French pattern. Will take a photo at the friend's house on Friday.

From doing up a few houses ourselves in the past, we have gone into our current house and have lived in the house for a number of months before doing anything !!! We have changed our idea on the kitchen so many times as our first idea didn't really work out once we realised how cold etc. certain rooms get.

Make sure you are going to be warm for the winter, a wood burner is great in a lounge etc. as you can stoke it up and open the doors in the winter and this will warm the whole of the downstairs. If the windows are really bad then get them done pvc as wood is expensive.

yes, will be living in the house for a few months before we can start. And love the idea of the warmth of the wood burner spreading through the house - they give off such a wonderful heat.

Hurrah. The guy who we wanted to do the heating has got in touch to say he is interested. We saw work that he had done and DH was v impressed by him. Will arrange for him to come and look at the house when we get in and give us a quote.

He has also done loads of stuff to his house, so can recommend other guys in the area.

Champagne
How are you getting on?

OP, if your garden isn't a building site, just keep the grass down and let it tick over for year while you see how the sun falls at different times, which existing
plants there are, etc.

I my case (in Australia) I found that a an area of deep shade in winter is subjected to scalding afternoon heat in summer, so I've had to think hard about the planting.

Echt
We lived in a house of the same size and position for over 30 years - my parent's house is just down the road and faces the same direction. I know how hot (ha! This is Scotland we are talking about) it gets etc. There is no grass or anything really. The previous owner was an elderly woman with health issues, she hadn't left the house for years, even to go into the garden.

The garden is a mess but I know that we may have to put it off for a while as we may well run out of cash.