repainting and recarpeting - how to estimate cost?

[obachan]

I know it's how-long's-a-piece-of-string, but I've lived in rentals my whole life and have absolutely no frame of reference - what sort of price-range are we looking at to strip wallpaper/repaint the interior of an entire 3-bdr Victorian house (about 1400sq/ft, but very high-ceilinged), and recarpet the upstairs (about 600 sq/ft)? It also would probably need a new bathroom.

We're thinking of offering on a property which seems structurally fine, but needs a serious interior update; it's not a disaster, but it's a very well-used family home with teenagers, pets etc and I don't think it's been repainted for a long time. We're on the London/Surrey border and we'd want to get everything done at once, by professionals, while we stay in our rental.

Does this sound like a very expensive project, or is it quite manageable? As first-time-buyers, should we save our sanity and wait for a recently-renovated house, or are we being too cautious and it's really not a big deal? Help!

I think you're likely to get a house that looks a bit tired for a better price than one that's all "done" particularly in your neck of the woods.

If a house is scruffy but clean and livable then you will be able to take your time with it. Learn how the light works in rooms and work out how you're really likely to use them. As FTB, I'm assuming that you don't have a large family of teenagers, in which case you'll have no problem living in just a few rooms while you do others in a 1400sqft house! We've been in our house since before Christmas and we're still sleeping in one of the reception rooms!

We've just carpeted two bedrooms - 8x12 and 11x12 with a nice quality but not vastly expensive synthetic carpet for just over £800. One thing we learnt by not doing it as soon as we moved in is that somewhere in this house there are carpet moths, so we decided against wool.

Thanks, PickAChew. I probably should have mentioned: I'm pregnant, DH works really long hours, we have pets and one DC already, so that's why we'd really want to get the property done all at once before we move in, instead of room-by-room while we live there.

Not looking for a really fancy refit - I think just stripping the wallpaper and painting the walls a neutral colour would have a big effect. Maybe in a few years I'll have the energy to put effort into making it interesting, but, in the meantime, I really just need something clean and simple.

Oh, and the house has definitely been marketed at a 'done' price, so part of this is trying to work out how much we should actually offer!

I wouldn't assume you can just strip paper off and repaint - often walls are papered for a reason,and they'll need at best relining,or at worst skimming/replastering before painting. Woodwork and ceilings will probably need repainting too. Can't help you with the costs though- we DIY painting/papering.

Regarding carpet - I can help as I've recently had quotes for stair/landing recarpet. I'm in a similar geographical area to you, and quotes were coming in at around £28-£32 per square metre fitted for cheapest grade carpet including underlay/grippers/fitting. This may include a premium for stairs/landing though. So approx £1500 to do your upstairs carpets with cheapest synthetic carpets, perhaps £2500 if you want to go for a better quality carpet.

To get a decent sized room prepared and painted professionally including the ceiling is around £1k.
Probably around £600 for a one man set up.

Just had my fingers burnt with a so called decorator (very poor standard). The lesson I learned was pay per job / room, do not pay per day! We've been fleeced paying a daily rate.

Can't offer any info on costs as I'm about 500 miles away from you, I'm sure it is more expensive in your next of the woods.

I wounding strip the wallpaper unless you’re prepared to skim as well... it could be hiding all manner of sins.

Just paint and carpet.

You’re looking at £500+ per room for painting. Could be up to £1k for big high rooms with tricky prep needed.

Carpets, depends what you want to spend. Hard to spend less than £2k inc fitting on midrange I’d have thought.

Thanks, everyone. This is really useful. There's woodchip paper in the property, which probably means the wall surface beneath is dodgy (at least I remember my parents put woodchip over the bumpiest walls) and I think there's also Artex - doesn't that need to be checked for asbestos before it's removed?

All-considered, the property's really overpriced, so we're a bit wary of continuing, now. It's the kind of property you'd typically see marketed for £50k+ cheaper, so we'd have to make a pretty low offer to get a fair price and go even lower to get a bargain.

Unfortunately, it's a pretty low-volume area in terms of house sales, so it might take a while for a better-value fixer-upper to appear. I'm really trying not to let pregnancy rush me into buying a money-pit... but also don't want to sit around waiting for the (imaginary) perfect property to appear. Aargh.

I live in a area where houses traditionally sell very quickly but it has really slowed down recently.
maybe you could try a lower offer and see what happens?

Yes, ihatethecold, I suppose we've got nothing to lose by making an offer. The trouble is that property is so expensive around here that even a 5-7% discount is actually a huge chunk of money; I don't mind the offer being rejected, but I worry that a vendor with unrealistic price expectations who does accept a lower offer is always going to think we've deprived them of their rightful cash and perhaps be difficult throughout the process.

I don't want to end up with the kind of nightmare vendor who rips out half the house and messes around with final price at the last moment because they think we owe them more money!

Local trend is for realistically-priced properties to go under offer very quickly, usually within two weeks, but there's a strong trend of marketing a property at a takes-the-piss price then significantly reducing it after 6wks-2mths. Some of the properties we viewing in February are now £50k+ cheaper. But this property has only just become available, so the sellers may still be firmly attached to the higher price. Maybe we should give it a few weeks.

When employing a decorator it is usually cheaper to get them to do as much as possible in one go. So ask the price for the whole lot.
Doing it just 1 room at a time will cost more

Woodchip and Artex? Nightmare! My costs per room did not take into account the hell that is this.

John Lewis have a rough cost estimator on their website for carpet, btw. Helps you to get a ballpark figure, at least.

I think you could get an idea of price quite quickly just by getting a couple of easy quotes.

Carpetright were very quick to give us s quote for the same carpet throughout the whole house.

Locally here (also Surrey/London) there are 2 retired painter decorators that do fab work, who regularly advertise by postcard in the local newsagents! Someone like that could be fab for you?

Just be cautious - we have done this twice now, and now learned our lessons... an old Victorian house that hasn't been decorated also hasn't been rewired or re-plumbed in a long time.... you may well want to consider making those things good before you send monney renovating. These kind of projects can spiral!

*spend money

We had exactly this situation when we bought our house.

We spent 3 weeks steaming the living room ourselves, but some of the wallpaper just would not come off and the plaster was crumbling everywhere.

Long story short we had to get every room and ceiling skimmed. We did it gradually, but if you can afford to get it all done in one go that would be much, much easier.

Probably cost about 10-12k for the steaming off paper/ chipping artex, skimming and painting alone. That included woodwork (some of it from dark wood to white but mostly it was already white).

There were a couple of bits of ceiling/wall that needed plaster board patching up, and the costs went up from the original estimate when these things were unearthed.

In one room we decided on lining paper instead as it didn’t look too bad but this was a mistake (peeled and looked bumpy) and we have just recently had it skimmed and painted.

Carpets are surprisingly cheap and quick to fit (couple of hundred for stairs and 3 bedrooms) and you can spend what you like per metre on the carpet itself.

This is East London, also a 3 bed Victorian terrace, 3-5 years ago.

Our guys didn’t do anything about an asbestos risk, I did ask, and they brushed it off. I did personally give the artex rooms a wide berth while the chipping was happening though.

We bought our 3-bed Victorian semi about 6 months ago and it cost over £6,000 to have the whole house stripped and re-painted.

We carpeted the whole of the upstairs (3 bedrooms and the hallway plus a stair runner), think that came to £1,500.

Agree with pp who said that stripping walls tends to reveal additional jobs. Once we stripped our wallpaper we ended up re-plastering half the house (at a huge cost!) and undertaking a lot of damp work.

egdehsdrawkcab that's exactly what I said to DH. Things seem okay structurally, but we really can't reliably tell whether this is a house where people aren't particularly bothered about decor (which is of course fine! not everyone wants to repaint every few years) OR whether lots of unseen things have been left to slide.

Even if we got an excellent price, it's not just about the money: I want to be realistic about how much time and effort I can put into a house over the next year (basically: almost none). So this one may have to be a pass. Thank you everyone for your input!

Sorry - x-posted with several others. Still reading with interest; definitely useful to hear the range of prices and pitfalls.

So we bought what we thought was a cosmetic job and spent 3-4 months and £40k basically re-building it.... that was SW London 5 yrs ago.

Just about to do the next one

I just had a quote in London for 3 bed house - £4k - paint walls and woodwork.