Realistic costs of renovating in London

[Msnotmiss]

We are looking at buying a 1900 square foot house in a costly road in London. It’s a heritage area although the house is 1920s. It’s a semi and is near derelict. It is currently 1800 square foot but has the potential to extend to a 3000 square foot house. Four bedrooms - 3 huge doubles but one small one. Only one bathroom and one downstairs toilet. Two sitting rooms,
large kitchen, small garage (no use for cars) to the side. Kitchen has not been touched since the 1960s. Ceiling coming down, dry rot. I have not been able to get builders to return calls - probably as it’s still speculative and they’re too busy to deal with hypothetical quotes.
Everyone says to live in a property before deciding where and how to renovate but it’s nearly derelict and we would want a second bathroom pronto!
Would love to know: how much to renovate eg redecorate, put in kitchen, update electrics and heating and maybe plumbing?
How much for all the above plus a second bathroom somewhere eg extending over the garage?
How much to do all the above plus extending the living space into the garden?
How much to do all the above AND a loft extension to go from 1800 to 3000 square foot? It’s in a pricey area in London so fear this will add to costs. I will persevere with builders but in meantime would like to know how much we have to borrow and whether this is feasible. Ballpark figures would be great too.

Would new joists everywhere add that much if we are ripping apart the interior anyway? Sadly the whole house needs to be done. Has not been touched since the 1960s though there is a modernish shower with rails that was obviously fitted maybe 20 years ago as the owner was elderly. I mean it’s a four bed house as it is but just not massive. There is a reason it’s probably going ‘cheap’ but one that was only slightly more habitable sold for many hundreds of thousands more in the summer. Is labour still quite as huge a problem as during the frenzy last year? I would have thought the cost of living crisis and crazy interest rates would have reduced demand a bit but would be keen to hear other perspectives.
Thank you for all the intel so far from all of you renovators and architects and friends of friends!

We want to buy soon (got to sell first) and as DP did most of our flat renovation we had thought we'd be looking for something to do up. I don't think we will now. The costs of materials and Labour are just so high that I genuinely think people will need to stop seeing renovation works as a way of adding value.

Any decent builders / trades are busy. If they aren't busy, there's a reason.

The dry rot would probs put me off. could need a whole new subfloor.
all the floorboards ripping ip
and replacing.

My DP is an electrician and he has so much work he can't manage it all. This is huge extensions rather than the odd changing a socket type work. He's so busy that he will only work within a 2 mile radius of where we live.

Would new joists everywhere add that much if we are ripping apart the interior anyway?

Yes, I believe so. Most refurb quotes, even “back to brick” ones will assume existing walls and joists are sound and won’t need replacing. We unexpectedly needed new joists in just one room during our full “back to brick” and it added £6k (although that was for block & beam to facilitate UFH rather than replacement wood). If there is dry rot in the roof joists and rafters you are looking at a new roof - if doing a loft extension you’d need a partial new roof anyway but perhaps not a full one.

So much work for trades at the moment. I work in architecture/engineering and we struggle to get people for jobs and we pay a fortune! Lots of people are adding to their current property due to stagnant property prices. I can see prices only increasing, both labour and materials, especially the latter. We’ve had to pull out of big jobs as we can’t guarantee the material costs. I wouldn’t buy a project house at the moment unless it was habitable and could do bits myself over the next decade or so.

New joists are a big deal actually as it means you lose the ceiling and floorboards, plus hassle with plumbing and electrics.
If you go that far you are basically buying a shell of a building with an old roof on it.
If your husband isn’t a builder you’re looking north of 400k for something half decent when renovated. You may as well do interior insulation while you’re at it.

@Msnotmiss I’ve just double checked my friends floor plans, they are at around 1900 sq ft and extending to around 2500 sq ft. Also 4 bed, 3 storey, but with 2 bathrooms already one which was put in fairly recently. Also hasn’t been given much love but doesn’t have any severe structural damage that needs seeing to. I’ll just add that they are going for pretty amazing plans with a modern architect hence where the 400-500k figure comes in. Bare in mind when they moved it they did an initial rewire / plastering / paint job to make it liveable whilst waiting for planning permission, quotes to come in etc, so they’ve already spent 50+k from the off.
There is definitely a breed of Londoner that can absorb COL increases, inflation etc, so from what I observe the building work/extensions/cellars are in no way slowing down!

I agree. We are going to end up looking for a 'done up' house or one that we can add to if we want to rather than need to. It's a lot of mess and stress for something that may no longer make financial sense.

Think of what it would have cost just before Covid and multiply by between 2 and 3. Costs have risen to staggering heights. Seriously, unless you have super-deep pockets, and are in this for the long term, it will break you.

I'm pretty sure I've found the house you are thinking about and I can't see you getting much change out of 500k for that work - and that wouldn't be with a particularly high end finish - it screams money pit to me.

Amazing potential, but I'm not sure now is the right time to be taking on a project house like that - especially one that isn't liveable in from the get go.

Thanks for all your insight. It’s certainly making me think twice or thrice! I think that’s why it’s not sold. Even those with cash probably can’t afford the stress!

Based on our recent experiences £400,000+.

Really helpful, thanks.

Good advice @wonkylegs. I guess we were mega lucky with our builders nearly ten years ago. They charged a day rate of 450 for all 3! I estimate we spent about £80k back then including an extension, underfloor heating, in frame kitchen, granite, Gaggenau ovens… Times have changed!

The original square foot is not that big for a semi. How is it going to almost double in size? Feels like that wouldn't get past planning in a conservation area.

I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear but I would walk away! We did similar but our place appeared to be in better condition to what yours sounds like it is (and was signed off by a recommended surveyor). The quotes we got from builders have more than doubled, lots of issues have been uncovered as we’ve been going, materials are going up in price, we can’t live in the property until it’s done, and timelines are blown out completely. Some of the initial quotes from builders are laughable looking back and gave us no indication of actual costs - I think a lot of them under quote to get the work. Our place is also on a costly road and quotes from other specialist contractors that I have got over the phone / via email seem to mysteriously become a lot more expensive after the site visit. The whole thing is an absolute nightmare. I’ve got friends in a similar position, and have heard similar horror stories about friends of friends - so I don’t think it’s unusual. We’re now in a position where we’ve ripped so much of the house apart that we can’t sell so just have to keep going. If we could turn back the clock we wouldn’t have bought!

Thanks for the wise counsel @backoftheplane . Why did the costs go up during the site visit? Because of the area? Or because there were horrors lurking under the floorboards etc? What do you mean by recommended surveyor - why recommended them? Could you have done more of a revamp job and sold or was it all or nothing? If you’re not planning on moving anytime soon, won’t it all be worth it in the end? Hang in there!

If you said 1k/ft2 for renovation, and 2.5k/ft2 for new you won't be far off a minimum figure. So 480k + vat for standard finish

We did ours 4 years ago, similar to op's and ours was exactly that, god knows how much now with the cost of materials.

New build can be more economic until you factor in the purchase price of the plot and location
any Conversion and or renovation work is like new build but with the complications of having an existing house around you with restricted access , parking etc

Unfortunately, by the time we had a full understanding of the actual costs, the place had been gutted - no kitchen / bathrooms, floors ripped up, some walls ripped down, no doors, holes in external walls… so we have to go through with finishing now and have figured if we’re going to go through all the stress we may as well live there! The stress of finding double + what we thought it was going to cost is enormous though… unfortunatey it seems to be a case of some contractors who we are sorting out seperately to the main contractors to avoid 15% OHP (eg. Stone floor refinishers) seem to be upping the costs significantly seeing the location - meaning we’re having to get a lot of different quotes to try to work out who’s giving actual market value quotes. (Although there have also been plenty of lurking horrors in other cases!) The surveyor was recommended by both our solicitor and the estate agent, and we looked at lots of online reviews - they were also not cheap. Despite that they missed everything from broken double glazed units to leaking roof…good luck with whichever way you go!

It’s absolute hell on earth! Our pretty simple job of knocking through the kitchen and adjoining dining room, then adding a 4m x 3m kitchen extension started in January last year. It was due to finish in April, but ended up being July. We opted to stay, mainly because there were absolutely no short term lets in our area.

It feels like I put half of my home in storage, and it still wasn’t enough, especially when the pre-built kitchen units - all 27 of them, plus drawers, side panels, etc. - were delivered, and stored in the living room. To be fair, by that point we were all hiding out in our respective bedrooms, as there was nowhere for us to hang out together, and it was bloody freezing as we had no boiler for the 3/4s of the build. WFH was fun, in my teeny tiny corner of the living room, as was cooking, which I basically gave up on, eventually, in favour of Just Eats, Deliveroo, and Uber.

Two things that will get to you:

1. The dust. We literally couldn’t walk anyway without getting covered in it. It got so bad I ended up ripping up the hallway carpet, as every step taken would send up a dust cloud mushroom. Our bedrooms remained relatively free from dust, as we used the zip up doors
2. People telling you it will all be worth it in the end. Yes, Vera, I know, but it’s not making this dusty burger any more palatable, nor is it helping my frostbite currently!!

Anyway, good luck!!

I think that's a how long is a piece of string question.

We finished a listed and uninhabitable 3200 square foot house about 6 months ago and spent more than double the per square foot estimates on this page (W London). Our builder has said if we were starting today, costs would be at least 1/3 higher. To be fair, we had to do literally everything as the house was a shell (worse than a shell) and we were dealing with lots of constraints on materials due to it being listed.

We did borrow for the mortgage and construction, but it was hard going to find a lender willing to take it on. In the end, we took a short term, high interest bridging loan for the mortgage, then moved our banking to a private bank and they lent to us for the mortgage plus build. It was an endlessly complicated procedure that involved surveyors, valuers, engineers, architects, builders, a project manager, a planning consultant, party wall surveyors (even though it's detached) and two QS's (the loan excluded professional fees, so those were out of pocket). We had to get 3 estimates on the value of the finished house and the bank lent to that. The build was assessed by our QS and the bank's QS at intervals and the bank paid the builders directly for that phase of construction. We had an additional side contract with the builders for things we wanted done that were above what the bank was willing to lend, which our project manager and QS oversaw.

It was 4 years from start to finish, partly as planning permission can be a slow process. Ours involved going back several times before everything was signed off. Materials are slow at the moment and one delay can end up in a stack of other delays, and even very full-service contractors are struggling for reliable labour--particularly electricians, plasterers and decorators.

Other things to think about are
-Interest rates - due to the nature of the loan, we couldn't get a fixed rate.
-Insurance (it was very expensive to insure an uninhabitable property during building works and they were very concerned about flood risks during construction).
-Can you really live there during the build? It sounds like it could be challenging.
-How easily and quickly the 'we're in this far, so why not?' bits add up. Both additions to the initial scope and higher end finishes.
-The professional fees were high, but without the QS and project manager keeping things on a tight reign, both the timetable and costs would have spiralled out of control

We stayed in our old house throughout and then sold it and paid off the loan. I'm honestly not sure we could have survived otherwise, not to mention that the rise in interest rates would have been crippling now.

Have I talked you out of it? 😂

The upside is that it was almost as exciting as it was stressful, and we love the house we ended up with. Good luck with your decision!