Renovation costs - is it really worth it?

[ManyMaybes]

With such high costs of renovating these days, do people still think it’s worth doing? And for anybody going ahead, do you think there’s any chance of adding the same value to the house after the work?

It seems that prices have become so deranged there is no way a house could be worth the purchase plus renovation costs, unless people are expecting to pay a massive premium for a high quality finish ‘done’ house when moving home.

Renovating a fairly normal sized house in London to a high standard could end up costing you easily somewhere between £500k and £1m (or more!). I struggle to see how this can be worth it anywhere apart from the most expensive areas of central London. Usually houses that need work aren’t that much cheaper than recently refurbished houses so you’d be at big risk of blowing the top off the ceiling price on the street as well…

This is what we are thinking too. Bought at top of market and think by time done (starting sept) we will have spent min 400k poss more but this is our forever home we are not moving from until we’re old and wrinkly and we already have about 500k equity in it. For us it’s more about enjoying this home for the next 25 years or so. If we don’t renovate we will spend 25 years living in a home we don’t enjoy (we love the feel of this house but it is v dated with an unusable conservatory and 30 year old kitchen) so for us, that is the value

As a first time buyer it was definitely worth it for me because our rent was so expensive and we were happy to improve it slowly, bit by bit.

That said I had hoped to eventually do some
bigger structural stuff - kitchen and loft extensions - which may no longer be worth the expense.

They are not my figures.

I think you’re right. We’re buying now and found that we could get a house that is in decent condition, that we’ll just paint and maybe new carpets, and it worked out cheaper than a house that needed gutting. And we also just don’t have the cash for the renovations.

Sorry! Replied to wrong post

I think it depends on where you are in the country. London seems to be a completely different ball game but where I am in Birmingham, it's still pretty normal to do your house up.

In our case, it's less about adding value and more about getting the extra space we need, but can't afford to buy. We've got a 2-bed terrace and it's still cheaper for us to do the work than to move to a 3-bed in our area. For reference, our loft conversion is coming in at approx. £60k and the cost of moving to a similarly sized house would cost us in the region of £150k - £200k (and is therefore completely out of reach for us).

I think next door to us were inexperienced and got a bit carried away with what they thought they could afford to do when they bought it. Lovely house but had nothing done to it for decades. They were going to extend to create a kitchen diner and replace the bathroom, paint it themselves and new carpets. We received notice of the planning application for the extension and it did look lovely.

Once they owned it they found all sorts needing doing starting with rewiring, replastering, roof work. They couldn't afford to do the extension.

A reno budget of 500k plus would be expected in some parts of London. But those houses aren't the average price houses in London, there are plenty of areas in London where houses aren't 2m!!!

I can't think why people would spend £500k on a renovation when they could buy a house for that much. I've done plenty of renovations costing between £20-50k including a loft conversion about 9 years ago but would not spend ridiculous money on one. I have a house in Hull. I spend £85k buying it. It has 3 bedrooms, and corbels in the hall. It was once actually a rather grand old house with large rooms. I am just getting jobs done one at a time and my list is endless. So far I've had the electrics redone, all old carpets in every room and laminate taken to the tip, a new back door fitted, kitchen ripped out and disposed of and the kitchen floor new tiles and grouted. I've bought a good quality pre-used kitchen from eBay which is partly in place. I've also bought a pre-used Victorian fireplace with granite hearth, because someone took the one in the sitting room out. I've bought new laminate underlay boards and laminate for the sitting room and the dining room but it's not laid yet. I've bought a tub of damp proof paint for painting the bottom 1/2 metre of the kitchen extension. Once that is done, still to do, mend floor boards where rotten, check floor joist are sound and replace if not. strip all old wallpaper including the dreaded wood chip off the walls, redecorate hall, landing and stairs with wallpaper. Wallpaper the sitting room and dining room. New floor tiles and grout for downstairs cloakroom and hall. Paint stair banister, and skirtings in hall and landing. New internal doors and door furniture throughout the house. Paint downstairs cloakroom and tile behind wash basin. New light fitting in the downstairs cloakroom. New worktops in the kitchen. New wall tiles in the kitchen. Paint bedroom walls and skirting boards. Carpet all 3 bedrooms, landing and stairs.

Sometimes it’s about the location. The house I bought 2 years ago is ALL about the location, the actual house wasn’t as important, as we were in the position to make pretty much any house the way we wanted it

I actually got much higher numbers than that for different levels of finish, from architects, design mags and so on. But I agree with you and had the same reaction. But it’s not necessarily £2000 for every part of the house - some would be more and others less.

A full house refurb could also include kitchen and bathrooms, replumbing, installing heating that actually works in a Victorian house, repointing brickwork, sorting the roof, removing chimney breasts, making new openings and installing steels, joinery and no doubt various other surprises.

We couldn’t have even done it for that price 5 years ago

Trust me it is perfectly possible to spend within the range of what the OP has suggested and not to be a mug, idiot, seen coming etc.

I’m delighted for those of you that can spend 100k ish or less on renovations. But to the PP who paid 85k for her house, you must realize that you live in a cheap part of the country, you couldn’t buy a garage for that where I live and of course you couldn’t spend 1m renovating an 85k house unless you knocked it down and rebuilt it in marble and gold leaf. Or to the PP that managed to transform a 4 bed house for 120k, that’s brilliant. But I had to re-roof (in a conservation area where only a certain slate would do), replace every single sash window (again conservation, so only timber sash and case double glazing) and repair crumbling and repaired 150 year old sandstone with only traditional materials and specialist stone masons working with hand tools taking 3 months. All that cost over 100k that’s before we even got started on extension, and full structural remodeling and refurb of existing house and decorating/ furnishing/ interiors.

It’s all relative to location, value of property, size of property, characteristics of property and standard of finish, whether that includes garden landscaping, technology, security etc as well as what work is being done diy vs getting pros in. Not everyone spending more than 100k on a renovation is some sort of moron.

We are mid reno/extension. Won’t make our money back and wouldn’t have bought a doer-upper if we’d known how much it would cost. I’m finding comfort in this thread that it’s not an obscene amount of money for london.

Also, if we’d waited for a done up house to come on the market we’d be paying a shit load more in interest than our fixed 1% deal.

Well of course very large houses, listed buildings, houses with structural work needed etc can all have renovations that run into the several hundreds of thousands. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. However the premise of the OP was that renovations of fairly normal houses in London cost 500k +++, this is the bit people are questioning.

I'm weighing up doing a 2 storey extension or clearing the mortgage before the kids go to university. I'm leaning towards the latter and living more. 150k for a family room that gives space for a dining table and additional bedroom (that isn't essential) isn't looking that attractive these days.

Agree. Two houses on in my road. House 1 needs some work, has been reduced once. Still for sale.
House 2 on for 100k more has sold in a week. House 2 is 'done' and a more current layout. Any work would be superficial colour schemes etc. It does have an extra bedroom, but to get house 1 to a similar place as house 2, it is going to cost more than the price difference.

@Handsnotwands we've shelved 80% of what we were planning to do. There's so much potential here, but the cost of work and the cost of borrowing combined have priced us out.

Saw a wreck over the weekend in London. Beautiful bones, large but still terraced and needs underpinning and agent said 800k is needed to renovate. We walked away. Bidding war on it for more than 10% over the asking price. I can’t see the house being worth the amount of the offers over price plus stamp duty (six figures) plus renovation costs! Where are people getting money from with interest rates so high? (I say this as someone who as paid off their house but no pots of gold waiting at ends of rainbows to upsize in current climate) And where will they live during major works as there is nothing to rent?! Unless you run a hedge fund or the sole I heritor of a wealthy estate, how is anyone moving into houses in the 2m bracket which still need gutting??

No idea @Madtomove I often wonder when I see the prices around here. Massive mortgages for some and very well paid jobs?

bomad often too

We have been in our house almost 7 years and are considering taking some equity to renovate vs selling and moving. I think we might be better off selling and moving than renovating however, there's nothing for sale. Our location is 100% spot on. Mid terrace with no garden so we can't really extend. Downstairs could be bigger but it's adequate for a family of 3. Really not sure what we'll do.

@Seaitoverthere coloured bathroom suites are fashionable again now, you can sell them and make some cash!

https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/gallery/coloured-bathrooms

@Wednesdaysotherchild I rather like it but have yet to persuade DH of its charms 😀

The 70s orange kitchen isn’t staying but will go on EBay for 99p in the hope someone will take it away.

It must be BOMAD I reckon as a mortgage of a million must cost around 4-5k a month. And you’d need a deposit of over a million for (not very special) houses I have looked at in not quite premier postcodes.

We just got quoted 800k to renovate our home in South West of England. Our budget is 400k, having to massively scale back. Not even our forever home but house needs a lot of work. Regretting taking on a project tbh.