How realistic is my budget??

[Wannabegreenfingers]

I'm looking at buying a doer upper. It needs a new kitchen, bathroom, boiler, flooring and decoration throughout. It's a 3 bed mid terrace, nice room sizes. I'll have 50k to do everything. Is this doable or am I living in a dream world. One load bearing wall to knock down and make good and the bathroom moving upstairs over the kitchen. This is currently bedroom 4, but is a plus 1 room off the main bedroom.

I could save on the decorating as I'm a dab hand and a few friends are in the trade. Ones a chippy, ones a gas engineer.

I did this for 50k in 2014, my hubby fitted the kitchen, tiled and decorated. I think you would need more now with materials sky high and labourers charging more because demand is through the roof.

Have you had a survey? We bought similar but found a lot more that needed doing - new windows, repointing, new roof, wiring a bit of a mess (some needed redoing and chasing in), new doors upstairs etc. It adds up.

Adding an upstairs bathroom was pricey as we had to have a chimney breast out (as we stole a bit of a room). FIL fitted the suite and ran the pipes for us, except the soil pipe which was done by the builder who did the chimney. Electrician to do lighting, and put in an inline extractor fan. All in with tiling, suite etc, adding a 9x4.5ft shower room came to around £12k.

Kitchen - you could spend loads or not depending on brand and how much you can do yourself. Ours needs rewiring and the subfloor is a mess - half boards, half lumpy concrete - so we can't just lay flooring, which adds £.

Replacing a boiler isn't too bad - moving it or putting in a whole new system, on the other hand...

Decorating yourself is a good money saver but be realistic about the amount of prep. Our bedroom was a mess due to leaking roof, pockmarked plaster, cracked ceiling etc, took about 6 weekends of prep. In hindsight I should have had it skimmed rather than spending so much time filling and lining it.

If you don't need any new furniture out of that, can source things like bathroom suite yourself and look for bargains, & you are happy with a budget kitchen, I'd say it's doable. But be prepared for it to take ages it always takes way longer than I think!

Thank you. I'm I'm at offer stage, but need to understand if I'm living in cloud cookoo land. I am concerned that the survey would uncover a few horrors. It's an ex rental HMO.

Think I may have to re think. Maybe find something that requires a bit less work. I live in an expensive area and my budget is tight for what I'd like.

The other option is an ugly house on an ugly street, but it needs zero work. Other than decorating and the garden.

What has worked for us in the past is just do up the worst thing like a gross bathroom then cope with the rest of the house for say 3 years. In that time you could have saved or house is worth more by picking the good area and remortgage using that equity.

Sounds like a good plan to be honest. I have an ex rental house, there was a backlog of repairs not picked up by the survey. I have spent 6K on it already just for essential repairs.