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…

I bought a fixer upper a couple of years ago - the equivalent home in the area “done” would have cost about £200k more (suburbs, London) We’ve take our time but now undergoing remodel/extension downstairs and have done the bathroom and master bed upstairs over time. All in I think renovating the house (3-bed) will cost us about 180k. So a small saving had in the short term, and it will be pretty much all exactly as we want it, though not including the later option of extending into the loft (which would be more £s, though we would have had that with alternate 3 beds that were much more expensive to start with!)

We’ve had to keep an eye on the budget - it is so easy to get carried away by super expensive kitchens and fittings! And you need to be a bit creative about where your money is going by really shopping around and thinking about where you want to spend more and other areas where alternatives will be fine.

No doubt it is much harder to flip properties to generate huge profit like it perhaps once was (maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing). But for us it is a home to live in for quite some time. So far, it feels worth it - but it is years of work and dreams, and obviously cash, so wouldn’t go into it lightly!