Double Your House for Half the Money

[YouAreMyFavouriteWasteOfTime]

Following the Sarah Beeny program www.channel4.com/programmes/double-your-house-for-half-the-money, where people improve their houses in ways that increase value far beyond what the changes cost, is anyone interested in a DYHFHTM thread?

we are just at the early planning stages but are considering:

1. lost conversion
2. convert garage
3. extend

the houses pros are its walking distance from a train station with easy access to London and has beautiful views front and rear. its main disadvantage is that the windows are small, the house is cold due to an internal garage under the main bedroom and you rarely see the front views from inside the house due to the layout.

its a 1980's take on the Shires style but is well executed and has a plain charm. the front will probably need to stay largely unchanged (except for the garage) but we want the rear to have large areas of glass and look spectacular.

and we want to do it all with costs in mind so at the end we will have spend around 25% the value of the house but the value of the house will hopefully be 50% higher.

so anyone else up for some free money?

sounds like a great idea for a thread ! if anyone wants to bounce ideas off a pro - I can be found via Houzz !! happy to help !! :-)

Well I am bumping myself and am going to keep going with this thread even of I am a double your house army of one. Well dp and I.

Current work is finding ideas on pinterest. Then find the right architect. I want to take lovely but ordinary and make it splendid. Its all about light and views, which are free.

Have you got the obligatory parents to tap when your budget doubles and you run out of money?

Well I will allow a contingency but have only googled cost estimates do far. I guess the architect is the best to estimate the overrun? Btw I won't be getting carried away and spending a small fortune on a kitchen. Its the fabric of the building, light and layout that interests me. Ex mechanical enginneer! I have this idea that its understanding the true nature of the building that adds the value.

Ooh, I'm about a year off this at the moment but will tag along for the ride

I am in the middle of this - have got to the point where I need to tap the parents and they've sold their house and can't lend us the money! Hurrah.

It will be worth it. It will give us a house that we couldn't otherwise afford.

I am freezing.

I had real snow on my Christmas tree (indoors ) the first Christmas in our property makeover, thankfully that was eleven years ago ! And have been enjoying the proceeds of all our hard work since then ! It's well worth it ! Have more than doubled the value of our place !!

Does it count if I'm married to a builder?

Does putting in a log burner count? Will that increase the value of our property?

Long term we'd love to extend. Add a second sitting room along the back of the house with a small downstairs loo. Upstairs would double our bedroom, the current bathroom would be a walk through alcove area big enough to put a desk/or drum kit, we'd have a new bathroom. But it would be £££ which currently we don't have.

If you are going to do it, do it properly. Sounds like a statement of the obvious but I am house hunting and have seen some dreadful extensions. Cold lofts, rooms like a corridor and a kitchen with a three inch step down half way across it.
We did loads to our own house, spent about £100K but it is all repaid in the value and then some. I made two mistakes, one was not putting an extractor in a bathroom while the ceiling was down and one was being mean with outside lighting. I found I started off laid back and said no to extra bits and pieces but as the work went on and the end result came into view I started to want perfection. I should have done that all along but it really is fantastic now. The key thing is having decent builders and a project manager, good luck with that. I can recommend ours if you are in North London.

great thread idea, we are pretty much at the same stage as you.

We bought a 1960's brick box in a lovely area a couple of months ago. It sits strangely on the plot and currently the drive is at the side ( we're on a corner plot) and you come in via the back door. The back of the house sits looking towards the side boundary with our neighbours. The plan is to landscape the front so the driveway comes to the front door. We've got this booked in to be done in a couple of weeks.

Then longer term we plan to put a single story extension on the back of the house as far as we can go to the boundary, then knock down the side wall of the house that faces the garden so the main kitchen/diner faces the garden.

Just had our measured survey done this week, then the architect will do the drawings which I'm really excited about seeing, makes it feel more real.

Will post a layout when we get it, as it would be good to get people's views on whether it works or not

We're kind of doing this. We have been in our house 2 years. It was bought as a renovation project, having been empty for about a decade before we moved in and in need of modernisation. We are extending it first both to create space and enable us to create a better layout inside.

The original house is a tall thin victorian terraced townhouse, with a lower ground floor, raised ground floor and first floor with 2 bedrooms. The original back extension element was destroyed in the war when there was substantial bomb damage around where we are. At present the kitchen is on the raised ground floor and bathroom in the lower ground floor.

So far we have added a mansard loft extension that has 2 more bedrooms and a small shower room. The building work is finished but the internal fit out isn't. We had the loft company do the structural work, but we are doing the internal partly DIY and using our own contractors. DP is being very fastidious about this so it is taking ages, but we are upping the level of insulation and adding soundproofing. In the new year a 2 storey back extension will be added which will have the main family bathroom upstairs and utility room on the ground floor. There will also be a basement storage room built underneath.

Once we have a new bathroom in we will rip out the whole of the lower ground floor and create a large open kitchen/diner. We will then take out the old kitchen on the raised ground floor and knock through to create a double reception.

It's a huge amount of work and at the moment seems to be going very slowly as we're living in the house and doing lots of work ourselves to save money. It will be worth it though in the end I'm sure. When we were looking for this house we saw loads that were similar and had been modernised already, but none of the layouts they had chosen seemed to work as well as what we have planned. We have also recently remortgaged so had the house revalued while only partially complete and the value has increased by 30% since we bought already. That is partly due to a rising market in our area, but the remortgage valuation is still on the conservative side and similar houses that have already been extended have sold over the past year for quite a bit more.

Ooooohhh I want to join. We have just got planning and are in the process of getting eye watering quotes for our (admittedly large) 2 storey extension. I may work out how to post my plans....

I'll join too! We are just waiting to hear if we will get planning permission. One neighbour has objected (despite is going through it all with him and making changes which he said he was happy with
We should know in next 2-3 weeks. Plan is for double storey extension

I'd be really interested to know costs for the extensions, and any great bargains people find for fittings etc... I'd love a 2 storey extension but our house is 90 degrees to the neighbouring property and we are already only 4 meters from the boundary. They have built right up to the boundary with their own 2 storey extension ( in the days where they didn't have planning laws) and have windows that look right in on our house already

right the shopping list for my DYHFHTM project has slightly increased:

the basics
(1) garage conversion
(2) loft conversion

if budget allows
(1) two story extension on back
(2) balcony on main bedroom
(3) second chimney so the current open fire in the lounge can be used at the weekend and a stove in the main living area for the week.

the good news is that a house on the same road, that is a bit larger, with better features and finished to a much higher standard has sold for 50% more than we paid for ours about a year ago.

so with a project to upgrade ours, both in size and style, twice the house, or near enough, might just be possible.

That's a result !! Means it's viable !! Yay !!!

Umm but it doesn't always work we've planning permission but will come out net net at best and I don't think the bank will even lend us some cash to do it (we'd be paying the lions share), so it's bloody annoying people can build far more complex things for half of what we've been quoted, I think it's a con tbh, like the £100k house.

kaebea, why do you think that is? The no gain in value?

I'd love to join in.

But I may have a few factors against me.

1. I have no money nor any prospect of borrowing as I'm a full time student and dh already has the mortgage in his name. We couldn't afford any repayments anyway.

1. Our loft is already converted.

1. We have no garage to convert.

1. We have no garden to extend on.

1. We are mid terrace so can't go in any other direction.

Any ideas?

we have done a few jobs since moving in over 4 years ago. All expensive but important in a trying not to die due to unsafe house sort of way. This means we have not yet actually decorated anything. Anyone want to come skim my artex ceilings and paint all my walls while I project manage. You have to be willing to work for free, see point 1. You may have to replaster in places. I'm not sure any of the upstairs plaster is actually attached to the walls. It wobbles if you poke it.

I'm not totally sure, my DH spoke to the bank, I think it's something to do with the fact that once the builders started, if they then went bust the house would be worth less iyswim.

House is valued at x, big whole is made in the side of the house, house is worth x - y, which is less than current mortgage plus new mortgage. Once house was completed house would be worth x + new mortgage... Or something like that???

At the moment, the bank values our house at pre-building works value less the cost of the loft conversion (as that is what we had started when they valued us). But if we had had the valuation before they started, then our house would have been valued at the pre-building works value. So our house according to the estate agent was worth £410k before we started. We reckoned it was more like £380k, given the general state of the place. Bank agreed, but we had started £30k loft conversion by then and so the value placed on our house currently is £350k. They gave us a mortgage based on the original value, but are keeping a percentage of it until we finish the loft (total PITA), when the valuer will come along and revalue the house. Of course by then we'll have finished a two storey side and rear extension, the loft conversion and landscaped the garden and reinstated the original 1930s garage. So if he doesn't value it at significantly more than £380k we will be SCREWED and royally pissed off. We're spending about £110-£115k on the build and fitting out, so really the house needs to be worth heading £500k when it's done. Similar house to our finished product on the main road (we are in a lovely cul de sac) is on for £620k. It's not worth that, more like £580k, but I think we'll do alright out of our one. We did consider selling and buying a larger house, but we wouldn't have found one with such a big garden or opposite DD's primary school and stamp duty is also horrid (although VAT is not much fun either).

I am not doing this again though. It's so stressful. DH and I are arguing all the time. The costs just go up and up and up as our builder drops casually into conversation something else we will need to pay for that wasn't on the original quote. Silly me, thinking that everything we would need to pass building regs would be on the original quotation.