Please tell me your mid-renovation nightmares

[emanonsah]

We are having a hell of a time and I don't get much sleep at the moment! Please tell me your renovation or building nightmares and how they worked out in the end, I need to be reminded there will be an end to this hell!!!

I feel your pain. It's the dust, noise and general mayhem that slowly grinds you down. We had plenty of issues and missing bits due to suppliers messing up.

We had more than a few sense of humour failures and tearful breakdowns in the middle of a destroyed downstairs. When it really got to me DP would drag me out to a restaurant for a nice dinner and drinks to calm me down. Just getting out of the carnage helped.

Now it's over, I love the result and looking back it was worth it!

For us it has been going on for many many months more than we anticipated and with a mid 19th century house we have had so many surprises- a new roof instead of a fixed roof, steels unable to be installed in a wall that had too many chimneys in it so wouldn't be stable, a single bat spotted that put a halt to everything for ages, plasterers claiming they aren't happy with builders finish and demanding more money for prep work, money running out at an alarming rate.

We think we will be 'in by Christmas' without a pregnancy in sight but the whole experience is killing me. I am so worried about money I wake up in the middle of the night every night having panic attacks.

Woodworm for us 😬

I live on my own. Next week is 6 months anniversary from start on a job that I was assured would take 10 weeks
they flooded my kitchen .A room that shouldn’t have needed any work. I was without a kitchen for 10 weeks with no notice
they treat my home like a building site
theyve massively overspent due to screw ups and not being able to mamage a piss up in a brewery.
after I paid the 3rd payment of 4, under duress (my argument was they hadn’t met critical milestone yet) they have tried to piss my off or distress me so much that I give up and tell them not to come back. The manager Did this by literally shouting in rage down the phone how it was all my fault all the extra work was needed and contractors weren’t showing up. Now he just sends me abusive and threatening emails in response to anything I ask.
im not “allowed” to call him or now even email him - and he’s just informed me that he has far more pressing and important things to deal with than sorting out my job and actually finishing (this is becuase he has most of my money now).

I am on medication and seeing psychotherapist as whole thing has triggered previous PTSD from abusive ex.

why are some men like this? At best he is behaving like a child in blaming everyone else but himself and lashing out. At worst he is a bully and conducting an agressive campaign to make me quit so he can walk without fixing all the snagging defects.

for. What I read, building work is littered with men like this. Such a shame as his sub contractors have done really good work when it has got done. It’s just him who appears to have talked shite about his project planning role and communication skills - nope he’s just greedy and once he had his money wanted to quit while he could still make a massive profit ..vs the small profit he’ll get now from the screw ups he’s caused,

I’ll add that I’m retired, the project took me 9 mths to find a builder (essential works form survey after I moved following my divorce) ..in that time costs tripled. My project costs over £65 k and it’s most of my life savings left after my divorce,.
I’m terrified of how I’ll cover unexpected costs going forward
his quote was higher than anyone else’s - had no choice to get work done really - leaking roofs so needed urgently.
I was over a barrel from start in todays climate around building works
they’re doing me the favour apparently and can treat me like complete shit
no partner or anyone else living with me - so he knows I’m vulnerable

As opposed to sharing horror stories (I have a few!), the thing that kept me marginally sane was taking photos. When things went wrong/took longer/seemed never ending, I could and can look back at the photos and see that things have moved on, albeit not as much as I want!

I bought my house a long time ago (2005) and stupidly agreed for my then partner and his friend to do the work. It's still not finished and now neither of them are in my life so I'm having to work it out on my own. It's shit, I hate that I don't have a finished house, but I look at the original photos and realise how much has been achieved and actually, I mainly only have cosmetic stuff left.

I also learnt not to compare with friends as their support set up will always be different.

7 months without a kitchen over here! All our money lost and no end in sight, with a house that isn't protected from the elements. Without doubt the most stressful period of our lives.

I feel your pain. We’ve been doing a new build and were promised to be in by Christmas ‘21. Thought it would be an exciting project, how much fun to choose all the finishes and move into a perfect house?!! It’s been SO stressful, pissed off all the neighbours, been held to ransom by builder demanding more money and having finally moved into an unfinished house I now don’t even know if I can like it after the trauma we’ve been through. I haven’t slept for months, on some days feel like I’m sleepwalking, have been genuinely depressed and now catastrophising everything and convincing myself it’s jinxed!
BUT I have a few friends who have been through similar and have promised it’s like childbirth….you forget the pain quickly. I just can’t imagine it’s ever going to be finished…

Agree about the photos thing. During lockdown my parents wanted able to see the work being done, so I made a 'book' of it, printing out a few pages a week.
Looking back now I realise how much you forget about what you had to do.
I'm keeping it going, partly because it's also useful to know what's underneath what you have done (like where cables run after the plasterboard has covered it up). But it can cheer me up to look back in it every now and again too.

Well we ripped off our roof for anloft conversion and then there was a pandemic and the builders shut down for months and months. And then no supplies were available because the plaster mines were shut for lockdowns and it was illegal for them to sell plasterboard etc to anyone except Nightingale hospitals for a while, so even when the builders reappeared they couldn’t buy the materials they needed.

Just be glad it ain’t 2020.

Oh gosh I take my hat off to you- that must have been utterly horrendous. We have plasterers in this week and the kids and I are having to stay with a friend of mine but I think that as soon as plaster is done and kitchen is in I am just going to move back in and start doing stuff myself- paint, put on skirtings, even doors myself. I just don't have the money to pay anyone else any more. I just need so badly to get it finished because we have to put it on the market

Architects were being paid to project manage.. but hadn't specified that the extension to the kitchen should ensure that the ceiling height was carried through all at one height - so unless we paid more there would have been a low section in the middle! And didn't include drainage from one of the downpipes - of course, we thought that employing people to project manage would ensure that this sort of mistake wouldn't happen, but we were proved wrong.

Builder gave up 75% of the way through... I think he'd realised that he'd not laid what kitchen floor he'd done properly - so we've got lots of unfinished bits and the rather expensive kitchen floor has several (at least 8) of the large 'plank' porcelain tiles that have cracked - and isn't grouted. I'm now doing the decorating myself and we'll have to get some tradesmen in later to do bits and pieces.

Not as extreme or stressful as others here.

started in august . Kitchen ripped out and walls went down. Still no kitchen - extension is built but no windows or doors at back of the house. Luckily it’s still quite mild - but house never gets above 14 degrees - central heating works but no point - would just be pumping heat out into the garden. I live lone bd really don’t feel secure in a house with boarded windows and doors at the back. Neighbours must hate me! I am also convinced the house must be full of mice by now!

it was supposed to be finished before Halloween!! Won’t be finished for Christmas.

have completely blown the budget. Well over £100k now.

I agree photos are a live saver. I shave also started to order the nice things like new rugs and sofas - fingers crossed there is a room to put them in when they arrive!

Not as bad as for you, but we spent about a year with bare brick walls in our kitchen for some of the same reasons. Gosh but it was warmer and drier when we got the plastering done (much of which was insulated board, which is great).
Bare brick is a right pain, you continually get brick and mortar dust on every surface. But at least we had the old plastered ceiling in there, it must have been awful for you.

If you do stuff like skirtings and coving yourself, if you're careful doing it you may end up with a better finish than a lot of professionals would leave you with. If you're doing skirtings, a proper mitre cutter is a big help-not recommending the model- that depends on the size of things you're cutting, but this sort . Ours is a Nobex, we've had it for decades, Nobexes are pretty good.They aren't expensive if your skirtings aren't too tall. (For old-fashioned tall ones the mitre cutters that will take them are a ridiculous price, we just modified a smaller cutter, but that was a bit tricky.)
Also, don't expect them to be perfect, because the walls and floors won't be. Just get as close as you can, and get some really good filler....the sort with little glass balls in is good.

Ours feels like it's going nowhere fast. No building works, thankfully, but a whole house renovation.

So far we've found a years old leak on the sink which previous owners hadn't bothered to fix, just dug a hole in the floor and filled with sand. Discovered there's almost no drainage around the house, just pipes pouring water around the house (it's Georgian so no proper foundations). The one drain we have had been blocked by buried towels so water was just backing up through the render and soaking the plaster inside the kitchen. Water company then smashed a pipe, filled it in and scarpered. We found out months later that all the water from the sink and dishwasher had been soaking against the house for all that time.
The render had cracked and ivy had forced its way in which meant the wooden lintels had become rotten when the weather got into the cracks. When we took down the ivy, we found huge cracks in the walls and windowsills.
Bathroom floor was rotten and so were some of the joists. No idea how it was holding up the big cast iron bath. The en-suite was full of mould, the house had a mouse problem and the kitchen was truly disgusting.

We've made a tiny amount of progress so far but it's bittersweet as we hate living here. Our neighbour (attached, unfortunately) is a massive twat and we'd love to sell up but we can't until we've finished renovating or we'd lose money which we can't afford to do.

The things we've done that make us happiest are the garden (when we can actually use it due to twat neighbour) as we're changing it back from a yard to a proper garden and seeing the turfed areas slowly expanding when we can afford it makes us see the potential it has to be a lovely home. Also the horrific bathroom which we've almost finished revamping and it looks beautiful.

Our story is not quite to traumatic as some here but it was massively stressful at the time. We had to completely rewire our terraced house so we found a spark and arranged to move out. We put almost everything into storage, essentially moving the entire house, and decamped with cat and kid to an AirBNB. It was supposed to take ten days but ended up being 6 weeks. We had to extend our accommodation once but then had to move to another bnb because ours was unavailable.
He left us with open wraggles despite me stipulating that the work include plastering. He didn't remove all the old wiring so there were still wires coming out of the skirting boards. He took up all the carpets to get under the floor boards but obviously didn't clean up before he put them down because you can feel big lumps when you walk on it. Worst of all, he didn't rewire the shower correctly. The work happened in Feb 2020 so in March 2020 our electric shower switch almost caused a fire. Since it was lockdown we had to live without a shower for 2 months and only have baths in our tiny tub.
Fortunately, our spark was not a very bright spark and when it came to payment he got the amount we owed him wrong. He asked for £300 less than originally agreed. I didn't argue.

p.s. all the electrics are now sorted and in excellent working order. I have extreme peace of mind knowing that we're not going to burn up in our beds.

I get so little sleep nowadays because I just wake up in a panic about the house. Money has just disappeared in a poof of smoke.
I have had to get some anti anxiety tablets and they are taking the edge off slightly but it's a very real panic and I don't want to end up numb and unable to function. I already feel like I am dropping the ball on so many things. My poor DC are being amazing.
My builder has started another job and I am panicking he won't come back and do things he needs to. We just had to borrow more money to finish off urgent jobs we cannot do ourselves like the electricity and plumbing and plaster skimming.

I only work part time so will be working in there on my days off.
I read these stories about builders abandoning a job and I feel sick. I have been feeling completely beholden to him and one has brought in labourers who are lazy and stupid and I have felt so cross about paying them but scared of making him angry and him walking away.
I have noticed thinks that are wonky. Our plasterers pointed out plasterboard that had not been fixed properly. I have no kitchen. We have a serious drainage problem that has to be sorted.
We need to finish and sell asap. DC need to start new schools in a new area in September.

Sending all positive thoughts your way. I hope that you can start seeing the end point soon.

This is piffling compared to other peoples issues but I was renovating my 1960s rental flat and amongst others put in a new kitchen , at considerable cost in terms of hassle- long wait for a builder, ikea messing up the kitchen plans, deliveries completely wrong with random stuff turning up, cancelled deliveries with 12 hours notice when travelling to the property and back took all day. Finally it was done ( worktop had to be hoisted in via kitchen window as stairwell too narrow) , new flooring, re painting completed. Then the council inform me by letter that there is asbestos in the old kitchen tiles and the whole thing needs to be lifted. I could have wept, but instead came on to mumsnet and got excellent advice from a poster who’s an architect. In the end it didn’t have to come up but the waiting and negotiating was awful.

I seem to have got off lightly compared to some of these awful stories on here.

Last house needed everything doing when I bought it so had to get gas piped in from the road for the central heating to be done, walls all wallpapered had to be stripped and skimmed in every room, ceilings had polystyrene tiles in every room and came down with most of the ceilings so all new ceilings required, complete rewire, bathroom moved upstairs and chimney breast knocked out and steel put in, plus new drainage dug out in garden, wall knocked down in old bathroom to make kitchen bigger, another steel put in and a doorway blocked up and a double doorway put in elsewhere.

I was doing 12 hour late shifts and spent 2 years having builders in on my days off and weekends. The brick dust was horrendous and I was using a garden bench as a sofa as I got rid of my huge leather suite as it was too big for the room.

Took 4 years to get it completely finished and new furniture, carpets and flooring done.

Never, ever will I do anything like that again, I'm too old to put up with the hassle, mess and sharing the house with an assortment of tradesmen these days thankfully.

I have to say I strongly suspect some of them wouldn’t dare behave like this with a male customer. I’ve been lied to and ripped off by a few tradesmen in my time. Now unless I know otherwise I assume they are potentially dishonest and incompetent.

Thank you for follow up. The actual building jobs were finished last Friday…yeah…it is a big relief to not have them here or wondering when the hell it will be over. I cracked open a bottle of fizz to celebrate last weekend.

but
within 1 hour of them disappearing off site, I got the invoice for last payment. Despite some materials still here needing collection.
On Sunday had a follow up reminder.
on tuesday another one ….
on Tuesday I sent a brief note: I have money ready to transfer by BACS within a few minutes ONCE they provide evidence that building completion cert is approved. I know when they sent me final invoice it couldn’t have been approved as at least 1 snag was required for an issue inspector raised and needed a photo taken on Thursday pm to confirm it was now done.

i don’t consider works complete until the building completion cert is approved- especially as I specified in writing, I wanted full building regs control and certs as part of “ works”. It’s a bit debatable whether a full building reg was required- but I insisted on it as part of my initial written spec.

im still not getting any evidence that completion cert has been approved. The bill final payment according to contract is next Friday. But, I don’t think the invoice date was valid given the works weren’t fully complete because the building inspector hadn’t yet said that. And I’ve said at least twice to them in last 6 weeks that final inspection should be done now given habitable space works completed to avoid delays at end- which they’ve ignored or shouted at me for micromanaging.

so I’m still fretting a lot and just want to pay damned money and be done. I suspect he’ll start up with threats again next week as we get to his final payment date.

I ordered a kitchen. Delivered on a Monday so demolished the old kitchen on the Sunday before.

Didn't deliver. Had to cancel fitter, electrician etc. No kitchen facilities.

Rebooked for the following week. Delivered. Got fitter and electrician rebooked.

Fitter turns up and tells us they've only delivered the top units and worktops.

Cue MASSIVE rant at in-person sales room, who told me that I should have checked the picking list when they delivered. I had, the picking list was incomplete.

Took them another month to deliver the rest, the whole house was upside down for weeks.