How to renovate with a toddler in tow? Practical tips?

[sellotape12]

We are (hopefully) buying a house that needs work and I’m getting really nervous about what that will mean for our life during a renovation. Can you share your advice/ must do/ “wish we’d never?”

We have done a reno before but DH and I were in our mid twenties and no kids - now we have an energetic 18m old and two full time jobs. I remember our weekends were taken up with sanding, priming, decorating, arguing, going to Screwfix etc and we felt in limbo for a year.

is moving out for a little bit simply a must have that we need to factor in this time? How did you keep it livable and dust free for your kids? How did you find the time to do things like decorating when weekends are usally filled with playground visits? How do you not go insane? Should we use an architect this time and get them to project manage?

FYI it’d be a small downstairs extension and renovation, including foundations, steel, new kitchen, glazing, adding a downstairs loo. The living room could be sealed off as a sanctuary I guess.

thanks! PS this is not Grand Designs level of stuff where we have to live in a caravan for three years, just a modest semi that needs extending and modernising a bit! 😂

IME it’s a non starter unless you have relatives nearby

I’d suggest you get a builder to do the extension to first fix (electrics and plumbing complete) and you paint and decorate. Get a glazer to do all windows and you do any making good after. Definitely keep the living room as a clean ( and safe) space - our toddler is fascinated with screwdrivers, tape measures etc as we’re always wandering around with them.

You will have significantly less time and mental capacity than you had last time - everything takes three times longer than you think it should. One of you won’t get any work done on a weekend as they’ll have the small human (we alternate days) and you’ll get maybe a couple of hours twice a week in the evenings after work as the rest are taking up with life admin (good for filling and sanding, rubbish for painting walls). If you want to continue to make progress expect to do nothing other than work, parent and DIY for months. Expect more arguments with your partner - it’s stressful.

We’ve found we need to be super organised - list out jobs for the week on the fridge and order everything ahead of time. Batch cook in the week to free up evenings.

@LondonNQT ahh thanks so much, that really helps. Yes I remember the arguing! Once the previous reno was done we both said ‘never again’ - but 10 years later here we are… it’s the only way to afford a bigger place

May I ask what the hardest part was in your experience? Can you pinpoint it? I would rather know now.

If you're DIY'ing, then just accept from the start that only one of you can be working on the house at any one time, because the other will be with the child/ren. This more than doubles the time to do everything because not only is there half the workforce, but some jobs are much harder for one person alone.

Moving out is one option. Downsides are that you'll rarely see each other because one of you is always at the other house. IME this will lead to the childcare person wondering what on earth the other person has been doing with their DIY time!

Living in the building site is the other option. You'll see each other more often, get to eat together, and the childcare person will be able to see what the DIY'er is doing with their time! It'll probably take longer though, because DIY will become part of life instead of a separate project, materials will need to be packed up more often etc etc.

Good luck!

One of you can also take the toddler on a weekend away. We did that a couple of times to get some bigger, fiddlier painting jobs finished. Just takes the pressure off having to have set meal and bedtimes.
DH likes camping, though that might be trickier with 18 months than 3.5 years. Do you have grandparents that would be happy to look after toddler for a couple of days?

@HappyAsASandboy Thanks so much for replying! I think realistically we will have to do what we can ourselves because we found that a builder doing things like painting added so much £. But obviously any major building works and plastering we will get them to do.
The other option is we squeeze our budget, lower our expectations and use an architect and perhaps their project management. Have you ever done this?
If I think back to what I hated most about our 2013 renovation it was
1: managing our itinerant builder who liked to keep cost estimates ‘in his head’, stayed til 9pm on evenings despite us asking for a 5pm finish - so we got no private time, and him not lining up his dependent people such as electricians and plumbers - so we couldn’t grasp a timeline.
2: The dust and feeling dirty all the time, especially at weekends.

If he is in bed at 7 you can get 3 hours done eash evening after he is asleep. Then weekends you just have to take turns with one doing DIY and one on childcare duty.

@Geneticsbunny Yeah ok that makes sense. And maybe we just rely on batched freezer meals rather than scratch cooking every evening. And realistically maybe it’s 2 hrs each evening as DS is a bloody early riser and we’re exhausted. Perhaps another idea is to carve out proper day-off time and we do movie night or something nice for the family.

Not a toddler but a 5yo. We went into rental. It's almost impossible to be on site with them as there's dangerous bits and everything is filthy so nowhere to make a safe corner with toys etc.

We renovated our last house with toddler, baby, no family nearby, and doing it mostly ourselves. I don’t agree it’s a non starter at all.

Where there’s a will there’s a way! I got them involved when we put the kitchen in. We had great fun building units, they helped paint and oil, we had “camping” adventures when bedrooms were being done.

For more challenging jobs we split load. I’d paint one weekend and H would take kids out. When he was plumbing I’d be with kids. Really awkward, need two people, jobs they had a tv for half a day or nanna would drive up and stay the weekend. We just had to plan.

Ok thanks @MelonsOnSaleAgain that’s really good to know and I appreciate the tips. We have no family nearby, they are literally a four hour drive away and getting on a bit themselves, so would only be able to use them if they came down for a few weekends here and there. Which brings me to asking, what’s the very very worst bit of an extension, the bit where you need to move it for? Do you know how long you were away for @RidingMyBike so I can help budget how many weeks? My guess is it’s the bit where they are knocking down the back wall, laying foundations and steel ie generally a lot of noise and dust everywhere prior to the first fix is the bit where are you really need to be out of the house(?)

Absolutely this. We moved out for 6 months and got the builders to do everything so no DIY.

We did this. Lived out for about a month for the structural stuff and then just lived in habitable sections of the house. For five months. With the kitchen outside. With a five year old and baby twins. I’m never doing it again but…

Make whatever decisions you can in advance. You will not have headspace to choose tiles or paint in the middle of all this.

Try to tie in holidays / family visits to your advantage.

Very low expectations about food / money set aside for takeaways laundry services etc.

Think about how much time you spend at home now - if there was pneumatic drilling and dust now, on the other side of the wall, where would you take DC and what could you do?

Doing this at the moment. Would say with a little one (and I'm pregnant) getting a lead test survey/kit and a full asbestos survey has been really important for us. We had the asbestos professionally removed as soon as we bought it (and before any things were moved in) and know where to be very careful where there is lead paint. Just because it's much more damaging to young children and their development. We've removed some lead items and replaced rather than rubbed down etc. Things like the stairs (which weren't salvageable) and some non-original skirting.

Re getting stuff done ourselves, practically with full time jobs and a toddler, we've found we have had to pay people to do things eat more than we thought/hopes. Otherwise it was just taking forever!

Our last Reno we did with a 3 year old and a 1 year old.

We moved out and lived with my in laws - it was hell. But it meant the kids were away from all the dust.

Id really suggest moving out and throwing as much money as you can on someone else doing the grunt work. Move back in as soon as you can. When we came home we didn’t have any carpets upstairs or a sofa. We spent months sitting on 1 chair and bean bags.

In the middle of a Reno (extension, remodelling existing bits, nee kitchen etc) with an 18 month old. Currently not in the DIY phase of the work but the one thing that's been most helpful - if it's doable in your project - is to get one room done upstairs away from the worst of the banging etc that can serve as a playroom, place to put a travel cot for day naps if it gets noisy etc. Its been a saving Grace for us as we can go sit in there whist our son plays dust free etc. saw some tips on a tiktok of a DIY'er who said prep your DIY task night before by getting all your materials and paints etc together... then as soon as nap time hits you can get stuck in rather then waking not long after you've gathered what you need and prepped the area. We try to use evenings. And anticipate shortly tag teaming of a weekend so one of takes him out somewhere whilst the other does some DIY xx best of luck with it all.
Oh and if your kitchen is getting ripped out ikea do a stand-alone stainless unit eith sink etc. builders plumbed it in. We just collect the waste in a giant bucket. Saves doing the washing up in the bath. Have managed survive with ikea plus in halogen hob, air fryer and microwave xx

We just remembered we turned our lounge into a kitchen/lounge/diner and made an upstairs room a second living space. We taped up the door to the back of downstairs while the worst of the work was done! It was doable. But I won’t lie and say it was easy!

We are still living in our reno with a 6 year old and a 2 year old. We lived through it when we had a loft conversion. We did all the decorating ourselves.

One of us does the work - painting, sanding, cutting, laying floors and the other watches the kids or takes them out. We normally take them out at the worst with dust or noisy machines. We also have an air purifier running a lot during the worst of the work.

You have to accept that it will take a long time this way. It has saved us money. We do a morning or an afternoon of the work, not all day. That way we spend some time with the kids at the same time. Recently, with renovating our hallway, I spent 30mins in the morning from 8.30am to 9am refixing the floor boards with extra screws whilst DH did the school run with toddler in the pram.

@sellotape12 Ideally you wouldn’t move back in until plastering, however, one could move back in after electrics/plumbing are connected for obvious reasons.

Hard to pinpoint just one hardest part for us but if I had to pick it would be the chaos. No way to unpack anything as we couldn’t do built in cupboards yet and didn’t want to buy cupboards as they’d be yet another thing to move from room to room. The dust is pretty soul destroying after a while - nothing feels clean. Well planned temporary storage solutions and regularly cleaning (even of non-complete areas) would have been helpful.

We’re a terraced house and if we did it again we’d get the builder to fully complete the stairwell as well as the one bedroom and one bathroom they did. Once the doors are/were shut on the unfinished rooms I didn’t notice them so much but the stairwell is impossible to look past.

We did it for similar reasons to you and although it’s been tremendously difficult we’re already talking about how much we’d be willing to do to our ‘next’ house…

Haha good for you @LondonNQT you’re brave than me. It took us a full ten years 😂. But I do think a lot of anxiety on my part is left over from our unhelpful and uncommunicative builder. And yes the plastering! Forgot about that. It kicks up a lot of micro dust. The rough plan was to do the upstairs bathroom first so we’ve got at least something nice to feel clean in, then wait and save for the downstairs reno (kitchen extension, flooring, heating, joinery to architraves and doors), but in London I do wonder whether it’s actually better to commission one big job than do it piecemeal.

@Notyetthere Ohh so helpful, thanks for the practical outlook. Sounds like you’re juggling the best you can. Good luck with it all and hopefully it’ll mean a username change eventually 😀

A lot will depend on your personal circs too and what your employment is like. We did a previous renovation (did as in got builders to do it - we have zero DIY skills) and managed six weeks without a kitchen then BUT that was before we had kids, both worked full time out of the house and could get a hot meal at work. And there was a relatively local laundrette.

This time round much much bigger reno project, some WFH, much more challenging work life and child meant it would have been impossible being in the same house. We'd bought the house from rented, so just stayed in it whilst the work was done - about five months of work. But we were having under-floor heating put in as part of that so floors out of action for a while.

The dirtiest most disruptive part probably is the destructive initial stages when walls are coming down, steels going in etc. Moving stairs created a lot of dust. Doing rewiring/plumbing meant holes in floorboards (at one point you could stand on the ground floor and see all the way up to the roof inside!) and gaps in banisters that meant it wasn't safe to take a child in even for a progress visit.

Don't underestimate the amount of brain space it takes up too. You get called on to make a million tiny decisions, often quite fast. I found it really hard to juggle that with work and the parent mental load stuff too. We really struggled with making kitchen and bathroom and joinery decisions as visits to those showrooms are really incompatible with a child - lots of breakable stuff, lots of concentration needed for extended periods of time. Needed both of us there for decisions o difficult to tag team. Many of them only open on Sat mornings, coinciding with child being most energetic! We ended up using annual leave for those things so DD was in childcare as we have no family support.

Our builder was excellent, which definitely helped! Very on the ball, insisted on everything being in writing so there was a paper trail of decisions. Any meetings on site were minuted (not formally, but notes were emailed out same day for confirmation of what had been agreed). He chased contractors up.

@RidingMyBike oh wow lucky you! Maybe you should DM me his name if you’re in SE London 😂😂

When mine were that age I'd be lucky to manage an hour after cleaning / admin / sorting life and I was no good for anything apart from mindless scrolling. If you'd have handed me a paintbrush I would have thrown you out!!

OP I think you're certifiable but I'd really focus on a weekend based strategy to keep sane. Like the idea of toddler weekends away that could be "power weekends"