Help me with cost: side return extension and bedroom to bathroom conversion.

[Sandrine1982]

Hi there

We are considering putting an offer on a property that's a typical fixer upper in a lovely area in East London, but I'm finding it very hard to work out whether it's worth it.

Has anyone done a side return extension extension recently in London? and turned an upstairs bedroom into a bathroom? How much did it all cost? We don't need the absolute top of the top in terms of appliances and finishes, just mid range.

The side return would add around 10 m2 of living space and would join the kitchen with the dining room (getting rid of downstairs bathroom). The upstairs bedroom is about 8.8 m2 to turn into a bathroom.

We have a toddler so we would need to go into rented accommodation while the work is being done. So need to factor that in too.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks

We’ve just done a wide return extension in east London. The extension itself was about £60k but we’ve actually spent over £100k including kitchen, sliding doors, architect fees, party wall, parking / skip permits and hire, furniture. It included a downstairs toilet and new kitchen. I’m not convinced it was worth it financially for the space we gained (we had an original budget of £85k) plus materials ended up being more than we’d expected. Good builders hard to come by at the moment, ours are now booked up for the next year. Hope I’m not being negative!

Definitely mid range finishes (maybe our sliding door was higher range) and we stayed in the house throughout

Wowza. Thanks @peachpearplum01 !! It's great to get a realistic perspective on this .... :)

Personally I don’t know anyone who’s had a side return done for less than 80-100 all in with mid range finish.

Bedroom to bathroom isn’t that expensive if the plumbing is easy - is it easy to the soil stack? Maybe £10k?

We put in an upstairs shower room. Came to around £11k for building works, soil pipe, suite, tiling, electrics etc. Saved a bit as FIL ran the hot & cold pipes, & fitted the shower, sink and loo for us.
We had to have a chimney breast removed and stud wall to split a bedroom in two, to create the upstairs shower room, the costs included that.
We're on the very outskirts of East London and are looking at a relatively small side return (approx 5 x 11ft) to extend the kitchen. Our architect reckons around £30-35k for the build inc steels, electrics, plumbing, patio doors and skylight, but obviously the new kitchen itself will be on top of that. I expect we'll also need to replace the patio (it's pretty scruffy crazy paving so no bad thing!) afterwards.

We've just finished our side extension and it cost around £40k, although we're not in London, we're in one of the commuter towns.