Costs for refurbishing a big house in London?

[Wiifitmama]

We have refurbed a couple of times in our lives, but only flats. We now have the opportunity to move to a big house. It's 5 bedrooms upstairs (4 big and one tiny), plus kitchen, dining room, living room downstairs as well as two other rooms (one large will be bedroom and the other small one a music room. The house is 1890's and had had the same owner for 50 years who just died. So the whole place needs redoing.

We don't know but are assuming rewording will be needed. Then refurb of existing kitchen, upstairs and downstairs bathrooms plus adding two ensuites where none exists. New floors throughout, build in some cupboards, complete redecorating plus changing all radiators.

I am thinking £50000 with a mid range spec? Am I way out?

That should say rewiring not rewording!

We did ours for £180,000 ( minus about 100 for our loft and extension I think you could do it for 60-70 (we have high end bathroom and kitchen appliances). We had to re plaster most rooms as plaster fell off, new boiler? Depends on spec of kitchen and bathrooms too, tiles, etc. you could do it for 50 with careful budgeting but things add up all too easily..... We are very poor!

I think it depends where in London, the value of the property now and after refurb and your target market.

I think you are pushing it:

New central heating system £4,500
Rewiring £3,000 (more if you are having light fittings included)
When you say new floors, do you mean floorboards as well as what goes on top?
I bet you will either have to replace windows or at the very least repair sashes £7,500
Will the kitchen just need refitting or is there building work involved?
What are the patio and fences like? £5000 (conservative)

Then fit two bathrooms £10,000 plus 2 en-suites (8,000) - are you really going for that many - you might need a bigger heating system than I have allowed for if there are water pressure issues, etc.
Fit a kitchen £12,000 (min)
Joinery in bedrooms for fitted cupboards and perhaps alcoves in living areas £4.5k
Carpets and/or other flooring £4,000
Decorate throughout £5,000

There's no allowance in there for building work, plastering, problems you encounter along the way. What state are gutters and down pipes in?

I think unless you know a lot of people in the trade, £50k would be very low. It would be very easy to spend double that on a house that size. Have you had it surveyed as it is very likely that the outside will need work - roof repairs, chimney work, repointing, window refurbishment etc.

It cost me 50k to do the heating (megaflow, massive boiler, water softener, 3 heating circuits and new rads) and rewiring in a 3000 sq foot, 5 bedroom house in London, which sounds as though it's in similar condition. And believe me I got LOTS of quotes. I think you'd need 100k min for a mid range finish.

What about roof and windows?

For a house that size I would have thought £100,000 minimum.

Thanks for the replies. I should have mentioned this house is next door to our flat. I knew our neighbour who died quite well. The target market is us! We want to move in.

I am not including windows in this work. They may well need doing as did ours (our flat is the ground floor of the other half of the semi detached property). We did them a bit at a time as we afforded it and would plan the same.

I am surprised at the figures quoted for bathrooms. We just last week had our bathroom refurbished in our flat. New everything, tiled floor but not new wall tiles. Just under £2000 all in. I budgeted £3000 per bathroom at the new house. I thought £6000 for the kitchen. We had one done at high spec about 10 years ago for £5000. We are taking our fridge/freezer and washing machine and drier.

Why new central heating system? He biker is a good combi one. But I would want all new radiators. By flooring I meant take u all carpet and lay good underlay and laminate.

Patio and fences all fine. We live next door so can see it all. She had the outside repainted relatively recently too (the woodwork I mean). The roof is an unknown until the survey but I wasn't including that.

The heating because if you are installing four bathrooms the boiler and heating system won't be powerful enough to service them and you will need new plumbing not just baths, bogs, basins, etc.

I think we might have different views about what comprises mid range. I've given a very conservative estimate for the kitchen.

That's very interesting about the boiler thanks. Currently there is one full bathroom, a separate toilet, a downstairs cloakroom and two of the bedrooms have showers in the middle of them! Very odd! I will certainly talk to a plumber about whether we would need a better boiler.

£3,000 for a bathroom and £6,000 for a kitchen seem way too low.

I'd double both of those.

Did you do the work in your bathroom- £2k seems very cheap if it included supply and fitting of a complete bathroom. Having said that, not replacing wall tiles is a big cost saver but I'm assuming you'd want to replace them in the new house.

Having recently had work done, I found its not just the big things that add up, it's the endless boring things like waste kits, extractors fans etc that really add up plus all the finishing touches like curtains, lighting etc.

I think £100k is going to be nearer the mark for all the work you want.

We have just had a large mid range kitchen installed and the cost of the kitchen was £12000 with fitting but minus work tops, my sister has just had a quote for installing a new ensuite into a bedroom, plumbing is directly underneath and this is also mid range, the quote is £5000.

We've just had quotes for similar in the North but only 4 bed and with addition of removing a chimney breast and quotes are around £75k plus VAT. I would have thought London would be more anyway so £100k inc VAT seems sensible.

I think you'll do 5- 10k on fees alone...

I can't comment on the costs, but it is possible to do bathrooms and kitchens for a lot less than some pp have stated - depends whether you go for the likes of IKEA or another supplier and how much work you can do yourselves.

Just because there are showers in some of the bedrooms doesn't mean you need put ensuites in instead. I think a family bathroom with bath and shower, ensuite to master bedroom and downstairs loo will be fine. If you can put a shower in the downstairs loo then that could be good. Depends how many people will be living in the house and the overall space.

It is possible to do it for less wow but the OP specifically stated 'mid range spec' which is why pp have suggested the values we have- I'd class IKEA as budget spec.

A big factor is the value of the house it's going into- you can't really put abudget spec into a £1m plus house but if it is a relatively cheap house you can do it.

Thanks for the further replies. By fees, do you mean agent fees? I was not including that.

We did not do any work on the bathroom ourselves. We got an excellent plumber and we would ask him (and his team) to do the refurb.

There are no wall removals or chimney breast removals needed. I am shocked by the kitchen prices quoted. Do they include appliances? We will only need an oven. Everything else is coming with us as we have good quality Miele machines. The kitchen is not massive but would need all new units, worktop and tiles.

Ok, in light of all you have said, I think £60,000 is more realistic for what we are having done.

I think you can do it and I am very excited for you!

Well aim for your £50-60 000 and then have a contingency, especially as the house hasn't been touched for 50 years because you will always find hidden problems. Also agree with pp - a combi boiler isn't up to the job of all those bathrooms (why so many ensuites??) and the heating - you are better to go with an unvented hot water cylinder (megaflo or similar) and a condensing boiler. Also are you planning to stay long term e.g 10 years plus? Because you may want to spend a bit more on kitchen and bathrooms so they still look good in 10 years time and you get a good product. So I think your estimates seem low. We refurbed a terraced 7 years ago and it cost us £50 000 (London too).

Our refurb five years ago cost £300k plus but it's a large house in north London, we gutted the lot and did some structural work. Most of the money disappeared in the walls and floor, ouch. So actually, going from mid to high spec didn't add much to the cost: it was the wiring, heating, floors, roof and new steel beams and windows that swallowed most of the cash and those things you wouldn't want to compromise on.

You need to find out exactly what needs to be done before you can estimate costs accurately.

As well as all the above, you are also likely to want to spend money draught-proofing/insulating/making the house more energy efficient which will add to costs. I agree with fox that a lot of the money disappears on very depressing invisible, often remedial stuff such as replacing joists or evening out floors so they can be tiled. It only takes one badly removed piece of skirting board to mean that you need to replace all of it in a room etc. These costs really add up.

It sounds as if it is a big house but you say the kitchen is not very big - is it worth thinking about extending it or knocking it into another room while you are having all the rest of the work done?

Architect/surveyor/building regs/planning type fees

If it is a listed building it will be £200k.

Just done it to a large house of slightly earlier period and had no refurb for 30 years.

That includes some rewiring and virtually a complete new heating system as well as garden landscaping, soft furnishings, new kitchen and 3 bath/shower rooms plus roofing repairs and a total inside and outside painting and some stucco work. There are always unexpected problems.

You wont even scratch the surface with £50k.

We spent 100k on refurbing what sounds like a similar house (3500 sq ft, six beds) on the south coast. That included rewiring, new boiler/rads, re plastering, two bathrooms, kitchen, new windows to rear, re landscaping the gardens, rebuilding a Victorian conservatory and new (slate) roof......

The house had been converted to four flats in the 1950s/60s and it hadn't been touched since.

But that was over ten years ago and we did lots of the labouring/decorating ourselves.

Just spent 100k doing similar but with an extension and three bathrooms on a smaller house (2500 sq ft) in the SW.

In London I'd be expecting it to be closer to 200k.

But there is no extension if conservatory needed, no walls moving, the roof was done recently, no landscaping. The outside woodwork has been painted recently and the rest is brick.

I do appreciate the answers I have got on here but the people saying £200k have had tonnes and tonnes of stuff done that we don't need! It's not listed either by the way.

Good luck OP. It's tricky to advise given limited info. You can make a house a home for your budget. I think there are also people on here who have refurbed for top dollop capital gain. I've done that too and it's an entirely different ball game. It's easy in London to have a 985,000 property in need of love and a lick of paint. £50k on it might mean it makes £1,080,000 on resale whereas £140,000 on it with extended kitchen and high spec bathrooms can shift it into the £1,250,000 bracket and beyond.