Tell me how much you’ve paid for work on your house?

[Chiikichik]

Considering buying a doer upper. And I know it’s all subjective. please tell me the costs of your recent work!

we are in london, so would be interested to hear what you’ve paid.

Quite a bit. We aren’t in London, and house was in ok but old dated condition when we bought 5 years ago.
New electrics, everywhere rewired
New water piping 90%
New heating system
One full new bathroom
One full kitchen, one smaller kitchenette
Flooring, replastering, decor
Some new patio doors and front door

Around £160k spread over 5 years. We did everything we could ourselves also to keep costs down. But things like heating and electrics professionals, plastering friend etc

2 new bathrooms, megaflo, new pipework and radiators.
Big extension, 2 roof lights, sliding doors, ufh, new kitchen.
New staircase to attic and additional velux
Woodburner
New patio, hardstanding for greenhouse, front garden small patio and remodel for large borders.
New front gate
New double front door.
Downstairs loo
refurb of parquet flooring downstairs
Some electrics including outside lights.
New carpets throughout and painted throughout (5 bedrooms and sitting room and dining room and halls).
Boarding over ceilings in 2 rooms.
Bit of plastering.
Mostly priced just before Covid and done over Covid - material had increased but they met the cost of the original quote.

Just short of £200K - expensive bit of North West. I think you could add another £100K to that fairly easily now.

However many replies you get - it's not going to help you as we have no idea of the condition of the house you're considering - or no idea what level of work you would want?
I love a do-er upper though. Current house I'm living in - I spent £25k when I first moved in (4 years ago) This included a full new central heating system - getting mains gas connected. New Bathroom incl floor to ceiling tiles, carpet throughout interior wall insulation and decorating. I Spent a further 10-15k last year replacing the roof and insulating the roof space and new kitchen.

Previous house i owned we spent £110k on a huge new extension and associated works, kitchen and decorating.
A good website for ball park quotes for work www.checkatrade.com/blog/cost-guides/

We completely renovated a Victorian, 3-bedroom terrace in Yorkshire. This was pre-Covid though and took five years (2015 to 2020). We did basically everything bar rewiring:

• New roof (including new guttering and new insulation)
• New boiler and boiler moved positions
• New windows throughout and new backdoor
• Converted the outhouse into a home office
• Two old gas fires and surrounds removed and replaced with new (including two chimneys lined)
• New kitchen (old one totally gutted and everything new)
• New bathroom (including moving a stud wall to make bathroom bigger, old one totally gutted and everything new).
• Loft hatch widened and some of the loft over boarded
• Every single room plastered
• New skirting boards in most rooms
• New dado and/or picture rails in most rooms
• New fitted wardrobes built in the mast bedroom
• New cast iron radiators in every room (which involved moving pipework in every room)
• Some very expensive wallpaper in some rooms, LOL

I stopped counting after a while but it was around £100K. Having said that, we've done the house to a very high specification. We could easily have done it cheaper. But, as I said, this was pre-Covid.

Too much after an extension!

One tip I would give is always allow a 5% margin - whatever quotes etc are, add 5% as things can crop up....they work on xyz but find something related/nearby needs work too.

Also allow extra time. A lot more time than they originally say!

If you are happy 'camping' in the house at times and can live through some chaos and wait for savings to be rebuilt, go for it! You can make your dream home in time.

Not in London and we did all building work, plastering, tiling, fitting kitchen and garden landscaping etc ourselves....

Our current (400 year old, two/three bed detached) house with half acre of garden was bought as a repossession five years ago. So some of the work was done pre-covid and we're not finished yet. Have chosen fairly high end finishes/specification (F&B/Little Greene paints, HMKOC kitchen, Steamvalve Orginals taps, V&B/Sottini/Gessi/Duravit bathroom fittings, Liberty wallpaper etc). So far we've done -

Borehole drilled for private water supply
New wiring and consumer unit
Additional sockets and light fittings
Replastered several rooms
Removed old water tank
New (relocated) oil-fired boiler
Removed rusty (non-Aga) range
Had two wood burning stoves (Charnwood and Dovre) installed
Re-roofed existing extension
Rebuilt existing extension frontage in oak/DG
Removed structural wall between extension and house adding structural oak beam
Removed structural wall between two reception rooms adding structural steels
Removed chimney breast in one room
Relocated kitchen
Fitted kitchen with island and Bertazzoni range
Created small laundry/utility and fitted out
Panelled wall in main living room
Created space for new downstairs toilet
New hardwood DG windows to front elevation
Two hardwood DG external doors
Reconfigured upstairs layout
Moved bathroom to new location
Fitted new bathroom
Laid Karndean in upper hallway
Decorated throughout
Landscaped big chunk of garden
Created roofed seating area in garden
Constructed four new timber garden gates

Spent so far - around £120k.

Still to do -
Fit out newly created downstairs toilet
Rebuild porch so fully enclosed
Complete garden landscaping including front garden
Replace septic tank
Lay new flooring throughout living spaces
Repoint stonework in lime
Complete some stone/hardwood cladding to extension

Probably £80-90k in total including a wraparound ground floor extension and reconfiguration, extended the upstairs bathroom at the same time. We've also had the driveway completely redone, the back garden we've done huge amounts of landscaping & installed an outdoor entertainment space. (Wooden cabin). We've done as much as possible ourselves, including DH installing the kitchen in the extension, did our own flooring, decorating, anything that was grunt work or not requiring trade licenses like plumbing and electrical. We're central midlands based

Not London but;

Boiler, conservatory roof, kitchen, bathroom, downstairs wc, windows, doors, guttering and Fascias.

Approx: £40k

All done between 2012 - 2021

Prices are higher now

In the next few years;
New electrics, boiler (again)

Glass box extension and loft conversion, full refurb, new furniture and landscaping - £600k.

Just finished large 3 bed in Swindon. We had...

Complete rewire

All walls internally insulated

Complete replaster

New kitchen

New bathroom

Woodworm & damp treatment

2 new windows & 2 new external doors

Stud wall

All new radiators & log burner

...(& other structural bits, inc. enlarging 2x doorways, vaulting a ceiling, lining a chimney)

Cost £70.5k

2x rule

Every job takes twice as long as I think it will (nasty stuff that emerges when you strip a job down, delays in getting goods/people in, doing your shoulder in and thereby making laying bricks slower,etc.) and I double any rough price estimate to allow for contingencies.

That's worked out about right for our doer-upper so far. The doubling both covered covid price increases and delays and gave us headroom to choose to do most jobs a bit 'better' (adding a pitched roof instead of replacing a flat one to the extension when we reslated, for example.)

It does massively depend. Does it need a rewire? Central heating added? How much work will you do yourself? It also isn't just about the cost of stuff but the mental load and time of choosing items ie for a bathroom and planning it out. How decisive are you? What timescale would you be looking at?

We have gutted 2 houses but it was mostly cosmetic, so new boilers, replacing radiators, kitchens, bathrooms, flooring, decoration etc. This house has had a double garage conversion and a kitchen extension but it is a house we will be staying in for the next 10 years and we have been here a decade already.

It's not just the cost to think about though.
You have to get the quotes then chose decent tradesmen.
Are you good at making so many decisions? Can you handle the stress? The likely delays and extra costs?

What needs doing? Then people can price?

also materials etc has gone up. Hard to know - also worth considering the ceiling price for a done up property like your’s on your road and how long you plan on living there etc

Depends on the size of the house, access, finish level, planning process, any extensions etc.

How did you get on with the conservation people in the planning department of the local council? Demolition of structural walls, rebuilding front porch, new doors, interior works?

2018, refurb and extension of a small London house.

Loft conversion with dormer and velux and new bathroom
New internal doors
New flooring everywhere, mix of wood and carpet
Painted all rooms
Partial new wiring
Partial new radiators
Small ground floor extension with sliders
New kitchen

£130k

We'll have spent about £15k once our new front door is installed. We bought the house (a 3 bed terraced) in 2020 and have done the following work ourselves:
All new flooring throughout
Replaced some floorboards
Levelled all the concrete on the ground floor
A new kitchen
A new bathroom
Added a sink to the upstairs WC (in the process of replacing the toilet).
Removed all the wallpaper
Painted every wall and ceiling
Plastered multiple rooms
Replaced 1 internal door and will replace the rest eventually
Revamped sections of the back garden by removing patio slabs, rubble and gravel and planting grass seed

And we had the following work done by professionals:
Upgraded the central heating
Replaced all the radiators & added a new 1
Rewired the property
Replacing the front door will happen in the next few weeks
Roof repair
Insulated the loft
Repaired a shed

Most of it was completed in the 2020 lockdown, before we had kids and when we had different jobs, so we had a lot of spare time on our hands! I think we've added around £60k to the value of our house, so well worth the DIY.

@GirlOfTudor - how did you do all
of those things for £15k only?
We did most of ours ourselves also, but things like rewiring or all new radiators would have cost £15k just for those.
New flooring throughout or a new kitchen costs loads.