Order of operations for home renovation

[modernrubbish]

We bought a house that needs a lot of work. Roof is leaking, needs a rewire, new boiler, kitchen and bathroom are from the 1960s, etc. Your basic renovation dream/nightmare.

After the house purchase (and our mortgage product being canceled and reduced twice on the day of our purchase -- eek), we'll have about 40k left to undertake immediate works. Everything "nice to have" we will put off to later. My question is how to prioritise what to do immediately.

My feeling is:

Immediately:
Roof -- put on a new roof, which I hope will not cost more than 15k
Rewire the house -- budgets I've seen online vary wildly, but I'm thinking 15-20k
New boiler if money allows

Later:
New kitchen and new bathroom
Double glazed sash windows for energy efficiency

Last:
Walls and floors

Does this order sound correct and does 40k for a new roof and rewire and potentially a boiler sound totally optimistic? It's a 3 bed period property in Edinburgh.

Roof first with plastic soffits and facias. Guttering in whatever is required (I’m abroad and the building I’m in, in a preservation area, has been done in copper!). Get quotes for that before you look further.

I am so inexperienced with anything roof related I have no idea what a soffit is but will look this up immediately. Thank you for your advice

The general idea is make everything maintenance free outside. So plastic has a long life span, no need to get the ladders out to repaint.
If you have a chimney, get it repointed and the lead work replaced, etc.

Did you get a survey done? Go through that and prioritise anything surveyor identified as urgent.

It might be, after consulting a builder/roofer, that you don't need a whole new roof but just repairs in certain places.

We've been quoted £10k for a rewire for a 6 bed semi (extended from a 3 bed years ago) so £15-20k seems high.

It's better to get stuff done that makes the building watertight so roof, guttering etc.

Then anything that's a right pain to deal with once you're living there properly - rewiring, any replacement plumbing/radiators all cause a lot of disruption.

How bad is the boiler? With a decent independent engineer you can often keep them going for a while. Are there any energy saving grants available that would help towards boiler replacement costs?

There are Haynes manuals available for some types of house in the U.K. We got one from the library for ours and it was invaluable for finding out what might be a problem and what different bits of the house are called!

Scottish house so the survey is done by the seller.

Nearly everything is a 2 out of 3, meaning needs work, but they aren't prioritised and we can't do them straight away for budget reasons, so we're trying to prioritise which ones to do first.

I would get several quotes and look for a roofer as may do a better job there is a great one just over the border. Then maybe three quotes from a builder who may have an electrician on board.

Priority is water tight especially as winter is approaching.
Electrics, radiators, plumbing then plasterer otherwise you might end up un doing some work later. This is what we did but the roof only needed slates replacing and chimney sorted, lead flashing and guttering replaced. We had to do the whole house no question.
Then central heating.
We then prioritised the kitchen and bathroom.
Sash windows patched and lined curtains for twenty years then replaced by a Scottish joiner( of the year) from Annan who I can recommend made bespoke sash dg windows to replace the Victorian ones.

We replaced the kitchen four years ago. It is much better and I have Wall cupboards instead of temporary permanent cheap £2:50 B&Q shelving😃

We did some of the work ourselves. I dug out the inglenook fireplace, knocked down a stone wall in the kitchen and several lath walls upstairs. I didn’t do the ceilings DH might have. I did the tiling and we papered and painted it ourselves.

Treat it like an adventure. The kids survived and the eldest renovated his first house. He was 8 when we were doing ours so I guess he remembered.😃

Personally I think once you've tackled the urgent works (things like the roof and guttering that could potentially cause more damage if not immediately fixed), then you should always start with the messiest and most structural works - so if you are taking any walls down, any extension, rewiring (as they'll need to go into the walls), any plumbing work, any insulation needed. Then joinery (kitchen units etc), windows (double-glazing) and doors, then flooring, lighting and plastering, then finally decoration. Some people go room by room so e.g. tackle kitchen first, then bathroom then living room or whatever which does somewhat make sense if it's a long-term project and you just want at least one room 'finished' but I think it's better to get the basics in place first throughout the house before worrying about anything cosmetic, and things like nice new flooring or carpet always have the potential to be messed up any time you have building work going on.

That being said, do investigate whether there's anything you can preserve with a small investment - like PPs said the boiler may do you a few years yet with a good service and overhaul, the roof may be able to be patched and retiled rather than fully replaced (surveyors IMO always say you need a full new roof) and if for instance the carcasses of your 80s kitchen are still sound you can do wonders painting the existing doors and doing new handles, or full new doors for much cheaper than a whole new kitchen (I know someone who fully rips out her kitchen every few years so it stays looking fresh when she could so easily just repaint to whatever the latest trend is ) . You may also be able to do things like put in a new worktop or new flooring quite easily and cheaply depending on what you have in there already and condition. We lived with a very tired and tatty 80s kitchen for well over 5 years because we were saving for an extension and didn't want to put something new in only to have to take it out again but getting the doors resprayed in a new fresh colour and nice handles added, some cheap laminate to replace the tatty lino and good appliances (saved and reused in the eventual extension) made it look perfectly acceptable for probably a tenth of what a full new kitchen would have cost... It's amazing what you can achieve in terms of 'look' with paint, filler and nice soft furnishings, plants, knick knacks etc. so if you do have to live with something less than ideal in the medium to longer term allow yourself a small investment in making things look their best. DH's builder cousin always says 'putty and paint make it what it ain't' and although eventually you do want to make it what it should be, it is nice to live somewhere that looks OK in the meantime so allow yourself a small budget for that too

Is a rewire actually required. Almost all properties over 10 years old score a 2 in the single survey. This doesn't necessarily mean it needs a rewire.

Thanks for your many helpful suggestions.

The boiler is described in the report as 'very old' (as is everything in the house -- the last updates were in the 60s and 70s. I wish I had an 80s kitchen, @maxelly !).

As long as it still works, I'm not sure if we should prioritise the boiler immediately or not -- I guess better efficiency might mean lower bills were we to go for a new model.

@Redsquirrel5 Can you please tell me who did your sash windows?

Also sorry this is such a basic question but the only previous reno I've done is a very straighforward loft extension. When people mention "a builder" -- who is that and what is their role? I was imagining we had to go out and hire a different tradesman for every part of the process, e.g. roofer, electrician, plumber, joiner.

For larger projects, typically those that involve some element of structural work, so e.g. extensions, knocking through downstairs rooms to create larger or open plan rooms, moving bathrooms or kitchens around it's normally advisable (for an average person) to hire a builder or main contractor to undertake the majority of the work which includes hiring and overseeing labourers and sub-contractors/trades and also to liaise with building control if needed. This can be as far as 'first fix' which is essentially the building being watertight and internal walls plastered, or 'second fix' with things like appliances, boiler and radiator installed, flooring and kitchen units in or 'fully complete' ie all painting and decorating all done.

While of course you can - if you have the experience and time - project manage everything yourself and hire your own contractors or DIY as needed (a) this is complicated and time-consuming, requires a degree of knowledge to know which contractors you need and when and give them instructions and supervise, particularly to make sure everything is done to building control regs and gets signed off properly, (b) a well established builder/main contractor will usually be able to find sub contractors far more easily, quickly and sometimes, cheaply than you as a private individual. The latter is getting more and more true with the major shortage of skilled (and even unskilled) tradespeople in this country due to brexit and other factors. DH's cousin is at the smaller scale of builders, he's a one man band working on small-ish domestic sites, he only employs a couple of labourers, but even he usually has at least a couple of projects on the go at any one time and a big network of subbies that regularly work for him, this means that with the inevitable vagaries of building work he is able to flex and reassign people and materials around to get work done when it needs to be (roughly, I'm sure like all builders his initial timescales are a work of fiction!) - so e.g. on any given day materials needed at 'Project A' haven't arrived so he needs to reassign the plumber that was due that day to 'Project B' and then put off Project A's plasterer until after the plumber's been, that's OK because he can promise the plasterer some extra work at project C the next week and so he won't get too pissed off, cousin can then run over in the van to the builder warehouse to get the materials for project A so they can restart work tomorrow, and so on and so forth. Basically because he has a steady stream of work coming through he has the scale to employ some labourers himself and keep reasonably good relationships with plenty of tradesmen so when he needs one he can pretty much always get a plumber, electrician, plasterer etc at a reasonable rate - they know it's worth their while to turn up and do good work for him for a fair charge because if so he'll put more good work their way, whereas for a private individual (a) you don't necessarily know how much that job should cost and what good work looks like, potential to be ripped off (b) even if the tradesman charges a fair rate and does a good job, the next time you need an electrician or whatever is likely to be in 10 years or more, OK you'll leave him a good review and maybe recommend him to friends but round our way any halfway competent tradesperson is absolutely drowning in work and aren't in particular need of recommendations and (c) if you have, with difficulty, secured a spot for a plumber to come on say a Tuesday, then on the Monday you hit some kind of unexpected delay with materials delivery or other trades or unexpected snag and you aren't ready for him, that's it, you'll have to wait 6 weeks for him to be free again whereas with the builder/contractor that he mainly works for, they can likely flex something sooner than that.

So basically that's a long winded way of saying that while hiring a main contractor/builder can seem like it adds a lot of money on for something you can theoretically do yourself, it can end up being worth it in the end both financially and also in getting things done to a good standard and in a reasonable timescale. That's for a project that will definitely need at least a few different trades and subs and/or building control though, if you are 'just' doing a rewire or a kitchen units reinstall and nothing else at the same time then of course finding and hiring your own electrician/kitchen fitter is probably more sensible. But these days anything requiring any kind of building control or more complicated than a single person to do a single job I like to get someone else to manage all that for me!

Thank you very much @maxelly -- your explanation is so helpful.

Our job will eventually involve structural work (we need to knock down a wall between a kitchen and the dining room) but because we can't afford to do that before the immediate remedial stuff, so I was assuming we were on our own to hire independent trades.

Ours is a big job that I think we could easily spend 150k on if we did it all right away, but for budget reasons (haven't got 150k!) we will need to break it down into multiple projects over multiple years. I'd guess we might need a builder for stage two (after doing just the roof and rewire, when we get into taking down the wall, then wiring, plumbing and fitting a new kitchen and doing up the bathroom).

I will get his name and number for you. His apprentice at the time has done some work for us and re sprung the sash on two windows. He lives nearer to us.They both worked for a company which went as far as Edinburgh and Glasgow and south of the border. This company has now disbanded but both lads are now working for themselves. Both great workers and very pleasant lads to have about.
One of them might do it or know someone who will. Distance would be the only bugbear I would think but if they are need of work they may travel up.

Would you like a photo of the windows?