How much to spend on fixing up house

[PinkSnorkel]

How do you decide when to make do or go for higher quality when doing up a house?

Eg. Fitted furniture from a carpenter/sharps or ikea that we diy to make it look more fitted.

Fitting laminate flooring ourselves or paying someone else to do it.

Just freshening up ceilings with dated textured wallpaper or pealing it off and having it skimmed.

Are there any particular areas that people would recommend against making do? I’m interested to hear how other choose to spend their money when doing up a house.

We have bought our forever home which is great but the decor is very dated and I don’t want to go round the rooms again in another 10 years time to re-do them.

We have about 15k in easily accessible savings but that needs to cover if the car/boiler/roof breaks or an unexpected job loss/illness. It’s also so tempting to get things on finance or a credit card but we’ve never done that before with anything aside from the mortgage. We are able to save more money but there are a few things that need doing this year. Eg. Changing some rooms around so that the baby has a bedroom to go to. I don’t know how much to leave in the bank for a rainy day and how much to plough into the house.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

If it is really for ever then I would suggest doing it all properly and to the best standard you can, but take your time so you can save up. I wouldn’t get into debt for anything but the most desperate jobs. it’s taken me 10 years to get this house exactly how I want it - moved walls, shifted the kitchen, all sorts - but now it really is right.
im also a big proponent of living in a house for a year before doing anything drastic. It gives you a chance to really figure out what needs to be where, and to see which rooms get the light in the different seasons. If it is really awful and you can’t live with it, paint it all a nice cheap white to start with!

We'll be employing someone to do ours, DH is getting on a bit and I have dyspraxia so anything using one hand is out of the question, as I can't control both at once very well

Agree with PP that it's a bad idea to overstretch yourself. That £15K probably won't stretch too far, but you could definitely make savings by doing a lot yourself, such as decorating. I'd definitely go for IKEA wardrobes - they look great and are so much cheaper than bespoke. Sharps / Hammonds are very expensive. If you're renewing the kitchen I think it's worth saving up and getting a good quality one. 'Buy cheap, buy twice', definitely applies to kitchens IMO.

Depends on the value of the house and how long you plan to stay. £1m house then yes built in wardrobes from a specialist company. £120k house that you plan on selling in a few years - IKEA (or cheaper...)

If you're confident to do bits yourself, like the cheaper kitchen, spend the money on the things you definitely can't do like skimming ceilings and walls.

Do the bits you really don't like first (eg stone fireplace removal), you won't want the mess further down the road if you've started to make other bits nice.

Don't get cheapy carpets, they throw up so much fluff and dust.

if it's a forever home i would spend more. but location and overall value also plays a role.
no i would generally not go into long term debt. but a repair such as higher end plumbing fixtures, yes, and pay a plumber 2K, yes, even if i need to carry that on cc for 2 months.
under no circumstance ever would i paint over wallpaper OR apply wallpaper on a ceiling to camouflage irregularities. but i would look at shower/tub enclosures vs fully tiling.

You say you don't want to go round the rooms again in 10 years, but everything will date and age in that time, so the chances are you probably will have to freshen things up. How much you plough into the house is really a personal decision. And anything around DIY v professional really depends on how capable you are. Plenty of people DIY and have houses that look every bit as good as a professional job - others make an appalling mess of it!

To be honest, expensive v cheap is also really hard to call. I've got laminate that's been down 17 years and was Homebase on special offer and we put in in ourselves. Looks perfect still. But I've heard of people putting hugely expensive Amtico or similar in and complaining it looks terrible in a far shorter time.

Purely personal opinion, I'd spend money on the bones of the house - decent flooring, nice shutters if appropriate. Taps are something I found cheap was a false economy, they are worth spending for a reliable brand. Tiles are all about how well they are laid - cheapo tiles look as good as expensive if well laid, expensive still look shit if bodged. If you're doing something like putting a new boiler in, that's worth getting good quality for. Decor things - curtains, paint, wallpaper etc, there's loads of really good stuff that is inexpensive, and it all dates, so you will want to change it at some point. Expensive fitted wardrobes, total waste of money.

Thanks all, very helpful responses.

The house is worth about 500k, there’s a limit to its value because as its a semi but detached houses on the same street that have been done up nice go for over 750k so I think that means we aren’t too close to its ceiling. Not particularly relevant anyway if we’re going to be in it for 20 years plus.

I’m just a complete sucker for beautiful things and want to start making it feel really nice. When we bought the house I really fell for what it could be rather than what it is and now.

DIY wise we aren’t bad, neither of us are slap dash when we do things, we would definitely do a better job than the current diy installs that the house has but we have 2 kids under 3 so fairly time poor.

Bigger jobs like the kitchen and some knocking through on the ground floor we’re happy to put off for 5-10 years until we have a bit more money it’s deciding how to go about the rest of it that’s hard!

OP we've just moved into our forever home and the motto of 'do it once do it well' served us well in our last house. We will do that again in time here especially with kitchen and bathrooms. We had a bump in the plan as had to make the house wind & water tight which has thrown things a bit 🫠

A room at a time is our approach - being a home owner part of the fun is the perpetual freshening up. We normally start with our bedroom so we have somewhere to retreat too that is our space however the focus has been the office as DH is WFH. We are getting a fitted wardrobe installed in there for storage.

Currently our house has cheap no underlay carpets - only found this out when we asked our flooring guy to come out to do kitchen & utility lino (black dog + black floor = trip and accident hazard!). Again we will replace as we do each room from top to bottom and finances allow.

Ceilings I would get skimmed and don't paint over existing wallpaper, the previous owner had slapped cheap magnolia on the existing wallpaper here and while I'm glad it's magnolia rather than garish colours everywhere it's a bodge to do that.

I keep telling myself it took us 10 years to get our previous home where we wanted it and will definitely be in it for the long haul again here which is fine as that was the plan.

Fancy bathroom fixtures etc don't excite me so would rather spend that on something else if it was 'spare' cash.

Have a good womble on marketplace / gumtree too, I've picked up some excellent bits over the years.

We're in a doer upper and had to fit a new heating system and rewire. Once we took off the wallpaper, and the holes for new electic and radiatior piping channels, every room had to be reskimmed. We did the ceilings too as they were artexed or chipboard. Like PP said, if it's THE home, do it properly. Our £20k saved went pretty quickly. We've changed everything, all new internal doors, the skirting and architraves had decades of old gloss on them we decided it would be easier to replace and repaint than attempt to strip the old wood.

My advice would be take your time and have everything as you would like. We still need new bathroom and kitchen but the main living areas are lovely.

I love Ikea, can't knock their furniture at all but there are some solid wood finds on FB marketplace.

We have pine floorboards sanded and sealed, tbh they look great 25 years later. We only did expensive floor (engineered wood) in kitchen.
Our wool carpets have lasted 25 years too.
The Worcester Bosch combi is going strong since 2004. The pipework from heating is even older.
We have only one fitted cupboard, in one room made of MDF and painted by a carpenter.
Otherwise we just have wardrobes, chest of drawers.
The walls had been lined when we got here haven't had to do them since, perhaps one coat of paint in main rooms (twice in kids rooms when grubby). Wallpaper lasted another 25 years in hall. Original fireplaces repaired and left in. Only one usable, that's plenty.
Kitchen changed twice (IKEA both times) in 25 years...moved the room it was in.
Doors all original, not changed just painted

No sharps no laminate. Ceramic tiles and lino in bathrooms.
Good quality baths, loos (Twyford/armitage shanks) and fittings which were here when we bought (grohe) we didnt put them in, previous owner did, have stayed, no need to change for 25 years.
So I suppose things do last if they are reasonable to start.
Bookshelves from shelfstore in lots of combos.

I think our first kitchen which was IKEA white gloss did date but luckily it was in the wrong room and very small so it turned nicely into a utility. I think where the kitchen goes and the actual layout is the most important investment so it's worth really living in the house for a bit to get that right, I regret we rushed into replacing the dated pine kitchen that was there with IKEA gloss in the original kitchen area. When you live in a house with small children the way you use a house changes and a cheaper kitchen might actually be the right solution to not being sure what your room layout is going to be long-term...we ended up swopping the kitchen with the room onto garden but only ten years in, before that the garden room was a play /family room for three kids.
We didn't do any extending. It wasn't necessary...maybe just a bulge for four years but now they are grownup we didn't need a big extension downstairs after all ..some of my friends are now downsizing cos houses too big!!!

Also we are so glad we didn't knock through. The house feels like a TARDIS cos we didn't. I ended putting some walls and doors back that previous owner had mistakenly knocked apertures in...it looked wrong and felt wrong. You knock lots of walls down and at first it's wow but once you have all the people and stuff in its harder to keep tidy or find places to hide stuff, without installing lots of expensive storage, which you wouldn't have needed if you had just kept all the nooks and crannies...I even regret knocking dowm the outside "privy"...such a useful thing in retrospect!!!

Personally I wouldn't be comfortable dipping too much below that level of savings so would be building up again first before spending much on the house. And I feel like in your position I'd be happy enough freshening things up so I could enjoy the place until I had enough to properly 'do' things that needed doing, but I'd be trying to avoid spending a bunch of money doing things that were only ok. So, like, say a window needs curtains/blinds - I'd probably look to pop up something from Facebook Marketplace or a very cheap option from IKEA (or make some) to tide me over until I could save up and afford what I really wanted, rather than spend a mid-sized amount on something that was still really just a stopgap.

Depending on how old your house is, skimming is the thing that transformed rooms in my old house. After grafting away, peeling wallpaper, patching dinks and holes etc in two bedrooms, I decided to get the third skimmed.
OMG, I wish I’d had the whole house done. It made me realise how many imperfections every other surface in the 1950s house had.

Flooring as well, I think that’s where you can really feel the difference in ££. It’s the area I’ve really regretted going cheap. Some friends have karndean flooring and it’s amazing and makes their whole house feel quality.

@mentalbandwidth we are starting with an office as we need to move DH out of the room he’s currently in to turn it into a bedroom for the baby 🙂 so an office and a bedroom is what we want to do this year. Maybe with freshening up the guest room too (it has 3 carpets and some terrible wall paper).

@Nettleskeins good points about knocking through and needing different types of spaces at different times of life. I’d had a similar thought process about the garage, thinking it would be good to make it part of the kitchen but actually having a huge garage sized laundry/boot room is very useful! Especially when we reach the age of having lots of muddy kit. And it’s a good place to park the double buggy 😂

The knocking through place is between the dining room and kitchen, I’d love to be able to fit a bigger dining table in and I think that let us would do it without having the cost of extending. We’d do that at the same time as doing the kitchen though so atleast 5 years away.

I'd prioritise getting floors, walls and ceilings right. Definitely take the wallpaper off the ceilings and reskim.

We bought a house that had a fair bit of diy done to it, some of it ok, most of it fairly poor. It needs intervention everywhere.

This is a 10-20yr home, not quite forever but long enough that we will do some things.

For us the priority is the living space, so we did the living and dining rooms. That enabled us to host and be comfortable with a toddler. Kitchen is not to my taste but I can live with it for now.

We lived through summer and winter before we started as that helped to confirm our plans.

I'd spend money on things you touch. Decent flooring, handles, textiles etc. things you can see are next so skimming walls and paint. Utility of a room is also important so move poorly placed rads if that is an issue. We did bespoke cabinetry downstairs to maximize space for books but upstairs is regular IKEA. For lighting the most important thing is having it in the right places, so needn't spend huge amounts on something unless it is obv tacky. A consistent theme pulls everything together with little effort.

Our number 2 is arriving soon and it has made us rethink our plans for upstairs multiple times, to the point that we are just going to leave everything as is until they are older and we see whether they want to share or not.

Money wise - we get quotes and save to pay for the work. We usually already have a ball park figure in mind that we had been saving to so usually the gap from quote to execution is 3mths. Our preference is to maintain our savings buffer. Everyone's level of comfort here varies. We are at the ceiling on our road so there's a small awareness that we wouldn't get everything we've put in back if we had to list tomorrow.

It's good to take your time in a new house, because sometimes when you have lived in a place a bit and kept an open mind about it, you realise that some things you'd thought of would be better done differently to your original plans. Our kitchen is better laid out because we had a delay in fitting it, during which time we discovered we needed a taller fridge to store shopping we were getting for my Mum, and that a slightly different layout would work better. It's still not all fixed in because the floor in there needs doing, and I've had some more different thoughts about how to do the remaining layout which will get us more cupboard space.