What order should we renovate in?

[Missnearlyvintage]

Hi everyone,

After water leaks in our house and discovering damp issues we are living in a bit of a mess, and it's brought our plans forward for renovations, but it also means that money is impossibly tight for this, £12k - £14k is the current budget. We know this means we will have do as much of the work as possible ourselves. The house is an average sized 1970s built 3 bed detached.

At the moment we've got areas of bare concrete floors, plaster removed from walls on the ground floor and the kitchen and bathroom are leaky or tatty or beginning to fall apart amongst other things, so by western standards it isn't a very nice place to be.

If anyone could give their opinions of what order we should do things in that would be fantastic thank you, I'm in a bit of a spin about it all and don't know where to start really (insurance company stripped plaster/ flooring after leaks). I'm worried that if we do things in the wrong order it will be a waste of money as we will have to rip things back out or replace them again to make something else right.

Current issues/jobs are;

1. slightly leaking flat roof on attached single garage - only leaking in one place, but wooden fascia boards are rotting in places, and we have issues with the drainage from the guttering (possibly failed soak away - needs investigation)

2. We've been advised to remove concrete paths surrounds the property

3. 3 single glazed windows are rotting and leaking (others are double glazed)

4. Outer wooden front door very tatty but just about okay, handle and letter box are rusting and door step is rotten (filling it has failed). Our house is the worst looking in the local area!

5. re-plastering all areas that have been stripped back

6. fitting new skirting throughout ground floor (we might try doing this ourselves)

7. kitchen is falling apart a bit, and cannot be tarted up now (fitted 1980) No way we can afford for anyone to fit one on our budget, but I don't know if it would be worth trying to fit something ourselves?

8. boiler is a back boiler which is functioning at the moment, (fitted 2002) but you can no longer buy back boilers, so at some point when it fails it will need replacing and moving, which will mean moving pipe-work etc.

9. bathroom - slightly leaking around bath during showers (shower over bath), cannot look under bath to investigate without ripping off bath surround as it is fixed and tiled. Toilet leaks slightly (clean water). Bathroom is mostly tiled and some tiles are cracked/falling off.

10. most flooring will need to be replaced.

11. Inner front door is double glazed but old and has already been fixed once (aluminium), both walls it is attached to will need re-plastering, so I worry that replacing this door after re-plastering will ruin the plaster/decoration all over again.

12. main roof ridge tiles are slightly loose, and pointing in eaves is not in great condition.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated - thank you!
Thanks for reading and sorry for the long post!

I would say the most important things are

Leaking flat roof and loose ridge tiles, pointing and rotting facia boards and drainage. All these things if not tackled could lead to more extensive damage making the renovations even more expensive.

I would do a temporary repair on the bathroom bath, toilet etc to stop them leaking at least. If the budget stretches to having it refitted then do that before the kitchen. Escaping water can do serious damage to a property and no point in replacing floors until that is sorted.

I would not sort the plastering until you have replaced the doors and any windows which need changing. Same goes for skirting.

Ideally you would put in a new boiler after that and new kitchen and cosmetic decoration etc last.

Does the concrete paths interfere with the damp course of the house? If this is the reason for having them removed then this is important too.

You don't mention electrics. Is this up to date and complies with modern specs?

Definitely anything that leaks water first... roof and bathroom

Is the insurance company not paying to make good the areas that were stripped back?

I agree- anything that will cause further damage gets down first. Structural then internal, so roof and bathroom. Plastering (in theory) is easyish, but rewatreproofing a bathroom isn’t, and sounds like it will need taken back to the studs and a full refit. You can buy the bathroom suite and tiles yourself, then get in company to install. I’d also go professional on the roof. Windows would come third for me.

Rough rule of thumb is outside to inside and top to bottom, so start with the roof and windows to get the house weatherproof before winter (depending on whether you have anything stored in the garage, you might want to leave that and just let it leak while you concentrate on the house if nothing will get damaged).

Inside I'd tackle the biggest, messiest jobs first, so probably the bathroom. Where are you going to move the boiler to when you have to replace it, and how long do you think you've got? If it's going into a room that you're tackling, it's probably worth doing it all in one go. How bad is the kitchen? Could you tart it up with some new cabinet doors off eBay?

Thanks everyone, fantastic advice from you all!

Our insurer's contractor do really awful quality work, so we settled for cash instead getting them to put everything back after the leaks. Though they wouldn't give us enough to get our local tradesman to complete the job... (drawn out claim, we were at our wits end so just took the cash).

Having read your comments that I completely agree with, I've come up with the plan below. I think I've just been blinkered wanting to have a nice clean non dusty environment for the kids that I've been panicking about that rather than tackling it logically. We'll start from the beginning of the plan below and see how far the money goes...

Order will be;

1. get roofer to sort flat roof and pitched roof issues. 2)investigate guttering/fascia issues as part of this roofing work
2. hire a breaker and break the concrete around the house and fill with gravel etc (it's well below damp proof course but because of building defect we've been told that it would be a good thing to do - damp proof course too high inside, 10cm above floor level)
3. get plumber to service the boiler early and talk about options for replacement/whether he thinks it will keep going for a while. I think we'll have a 5 year cut off. If spare parts are available and he thinks we'll get 5 more years out of it we'll leave it where it is for now.
4. get the windows double glazed, but leave the front and back doors for now in case we need to get bath suites in etc. Which might damage the doors.
5. investigate the bathroom and look at our options. 2 plumbers and DH have tried to fix the toilet, it was fitted wrong by one of the plumbers originally a couple of years ago and cannot be fixed so a new one is the only way to sort that. All water is caught from that as far as I'm aware. It's a drip a day type leak. Bath leak I think is tiling/seal related - I have tried to rectify both but the whole wall of tiles is in a 'delicate' state.
6. gather quotes for kitchens, doors, plastering, flooring etc. Work out what we will do asap and what will have to wait given the spend prior to this.

If the above works are due to last longer than 6 months then I've agreed with DH that I'll spend as little as possible on some vinyl flooring for the kitchen in the meantime, just so that I feel like I can keep the place clean as the concrete floor is so porous I can't wash it etc. and we have pets so I've become a bit paranoid about it being dirty. I think that'll help my sanity quite a lot!

Thanks again everyone, you've all been really helpful!