Crazy quotes? Regretting buying your fixer upper? Join me in home renovation rants!

[Yemelade]

Some of you might remember me from my house sprucing (low level, manageable DIY) thread where I was preparing to sell up my old house.

That purchase is now complete, and we are now semi-regretful owners of a run down fixer upper.

I dillegently made a spreadsheet and researched possible prices of work needed. New roof, kitchen, bathrooms, windows. Its essentially a money pit. IIinitially, prior to purchase, thought we had a healthy budget at 62k, but have quickly realised this is nowhere near enough.

Please join me in rants, woes, discoveries and doom. It would be good to hear from anyone in a similar boat so that my colleagues are no longer plagued by this regularly! I am in North East UK.

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He suggested it would be cheaper, and cheaper again if we sourced our own plumbers to move pipework (from existing kitchen to existing dining room) where it is needed in advance of him fitting the kitchen. So we have left it at that for now as it was vague without specific numbers. I was planning to go back and ask for a full itemized quote but tbh I'm not sure we want to proceed with this company given the hard sale tactics and mentioning cash in hand...

In the meantime and by contrast, we've just hired a plumber and groundwork team to remove and install a soil stack with new connection to drains and sewerage and includes outside digging with a piece of machinery. It includes everything needed for the work and is being moved to a totally different part of the housr. This is 2 days work and is £1400 which I expected would be much more expensive. They're helping us with building control and submitting applications too. I am constantly surprised by prices!

If you do decide to get the kitchen fitted and not tackle yourselves, it might be more cost effective to get a bog standard kitchen fitter to do it. Carpenters/joiners generally charge more and especially if you get a DIY kitchen you won't need anybody with exceptional woodwork skills! Then you can get somebody else to do the more skilled bits.

The units from DIY kitchens come fully assembled, so if you've measured and drawn out your kitchen plan correctly it's not hard to fit the kitchen yourself.

We did this, and added the plinths / trims / end panels then fitted worktops from Ikea. It looked fabulous, with high end handles, sink and taps sourced online.

We saved ££££ doing the whole thing ourselves, and it wasn't hard.

Yeah, that's why I mentioned about it being a DIY kitchen.

I'm still not sure I'd trust myself to get it level etc though... and pretty sure I'd balls up the worktop 🙈

This has been our approach (bar the giving up our jobs!) but we quickly realised we'd have to do some of it ourselves. I don't know if I'm proud or ashamed to say YouTube was our teacher, but thanks to that we successfully took out a toilet and sink, installed new ones, lay flooring and did the wall tiling ourselves. (Quotes for all that work by trades came in at well over £1000).
We've been living in our 1980s doer-upper for nearly 4 years now, and while we have haven't made as much progress as I'd like we are finally entering the stage where we can get the kitchen extension done. Thank the lorddddd.

I'll join you OP. We bought needing to do the kitchen - got a couple of ball park quotes before we bought - coming in around £25 - 30k (including a steel as we wanted to take the chimney breast out).

Bought got the party wall stuff in place - then got final estimate for the kitchen work - now including VAT the whole thing is looking at more like £50k+.

Paused for now, as for that sort of money we might as well put it towards doing the side return.

Some of these are 😱 For my kitchen I paid £200 for units and a cooker on Facebook marketplace. Nothing wrong with them, house owners just wanted something else. Kept my previous fridge, washer etc. £800 for fitting units by a local handyman just starting out. That was a risk but his work was excellent. Decorating (painting and tiling) with family help about £300. I also got some plastering done by a trainee in another part of the house. The finish was not 100% perfect but I'd accepted that in exchange for a much lower cost and it was papered over no problem.

I did not do a very good job of keeping in touch or keeping updated!

Since posting, we have:

• Obtained roof insulation and solar panels
• Full rewire
• Pulled out old stairs and installed new
• Half installed a downstairs shower room
• Purchased all kitchen, worktop and appliances

There is still so much left to do. Half our budget is gone, and its very stressful. However we are so excited to get it all done. Hoping by the end of the year!

How is everyone doing?

You seem to have done all the things I'd suggest bar one, which may or may not be applicable. Is it an old house with lime plaster anywhere? If so, and you have wallpaper, try in one room taking it off, scrubbing all the paste off back to the plaster with a scourer so it won't be there to hold moisture ( it really does) until when you put a damp hand on the dry plaster it doesn't feel sticky in any way, and painting with a claypaint to let the walls breathe. Even just try it with one wall.
Good luck. Sorting out damp isn't fun, I think it usually means doing a lot of small things.
You don't have cavity wall insulation, do you? That can be a problem in some houses, esp older ones.
Is the damp general, or just patches on lower walls?

That's impressive for 4 months @Yemelade . Have you got any finished rooms yet? I found it much easier once we had a done room that we could sit in. Remind me, are you living onsite?

My DH has managed to wipe all the mould off the hall ceiling and take the remaining woodchip down using ladders and I think we have a plan for how to get to the ceiling to paint.

We currently have some lime repointing going on so I have to keep going and spraying the hessian down to keep it damp which is a bit of a pain in the arse.

I agree costs have rocketed in the last few years, I did post on here a few years back warning that costs were steeply rising after reading some trade articles.

We are renting a place currently because it's not actually habitable right now (no bathroom or hot water as we are in the process of getting under floor heating done and waiting for tiler to tile bathroom floor before suite goes in!) But we anticipate having 2 habitable rooms by the end of the month or within next 3-4 weeks so we intend to fully move in then. I feel like it will go from a shell to almost finished in a few short weeks!

Regarding your work, woodchip is awful to remove! Sending you a virtual steamer. We had downstairs full of textured/pattern wallpaper which was covered over about 6 times and we could only take 1 layer off at a time! Took forever. I had 3 weeks off at christmas from work and spent most of that time stripping wallpaper! Saves so much money doing it yourself though.

We've found the same with builders work. Hubby is basically saving us £300 a day on his days off doing general laboring and ferrying things about.

Luckily/unluckily, our house was empty for ages before we moved in and had a mains water leak on an outside wall and at some point the roof had leaked quite badly so the paper was pretty much just hanging off. I have had to remove woodchip in another house though and it was awful.

Oh this is helpful @Yemelade are you having a new toilet put in?

We haven’t bought ours yet, but we’re in the process of buying what we thought was a liveable-off-the-bat house but the survey (and subsequent specialist surveys) have thrown up all kinds of things so will probably end up having new floors downstairs amongst other things. My dream of putting in a new downstairs toilet might have to be paused while we pay for all that instead 😬

I'll join! Moved in October to our forever home that needed everything done. Then found out we needed structural work done on the roof which wasn't in the survey.

Been going room by room since then. Done study, dining room, daughters room. Doing the lounge and downstairs cloakroom while waiting for planning and building regs which are now in. Before we can even look for builders!

Unfortunately neighbour isn't happy about our extension but we're hoping it will go through.

Has been so much more stressful than we thought but much less stressful than the house buying and selling process as at least we have some control over it all!!

We’ve just put our fixer upper back on the market after four years of ever increasing quotes and each time having to scurry about wondering where the money will come from. We’ve had an offer accepted on a place that has been done up. I’m so relieved I could cry.

BUT two viewings last weekend and feedback is “it needs too much work”. I just don’t think it is financially sustainable to gut a house anymore unless you will do most of the work yourself.

We’re 3 years into our renovation. Estimates have rocketed in that time. Initial budget was £100K. When we got to £200K I gave up counting. Had to remortgage and take out a loan, and we still don’t have enough.

It’s the 3rd house we’ve renovated. Previous ones took 6 months, to a year. But this one is the gift that keeps on giving! Current mood is ‘Why, just why? What the fuck were we thinking?’.

Our first house was a new build. If we still lived there we would be mortgage free. But no, we got sucked into the period property trap, so we must live a modest life style in a house that’s never finished, with lots and lots of dust.

Oh, and our teenagers hate us for doing this to them. They long for the new build. Our house is ‘so embarrassing’ and they’re annoyed that we can’t afford to go anywhere or do anything ‘until the house is finished’ which is never.

The saddest thing of all is that our garden has been like a building site for 3 years and is unusable - I feel sorry for my kids and my dog!

“I just don’t think it is financially sustainable to gut a house anymore unless you will do most of the work yourself.” @Reachoutreachout I think you’re spot on there.

Check out the Sympathetic Restoration account on Instagram — is your home old / traditionally built?

I'll join too. Mine's only approx 20 year old house so although it had been treated badly in that time and I bought eyes open as a "project", I keep finding new things that are broken in ways I didn't know what possible and things that hurtling up the to-do list. The biggest unexpected expense was the boiler that I thought I could eke out for a year or two was actually in need of immediate replacement, and interior doors that are carboardy and ugly but I thought I could live with while other stuff got done, but door handles have obviously been wrenched on and off so many times, there's no repairing them and I'm scared to shut any doors in case I get trapped in a room - so new doors throughout are going to cost me. Although some things aren't as bad as I thought - I've got things that were just filthy rather than damaged. It's a lot of work though and I feel quite trapped in the house working at the moment rather than going out and exploring and enjoying my new area.

@Tupster this place is good and cheap for doors
https://www.doorsgalore.co.uk/

Is it a castle? Average 3/4 bed should be no more than £5k ish

Genuine question as even though I owned a flat for 6 years I have hardly any experience in diy. I bought a spruced up flat from an ex landlord so new carpets, new (cheap) paint and only a small 2 bed so we lived in it. We have only painted bathroom ceiling and replaced boiler plus appliances since moving in.

I see a marginally larger flat (2 bedrooms and 20 sq m larger) in my area on a nicer road which is 150k more expensive but looks like a probate property. Service charges similar to my flat and like my flat is residents managed. Old carpets tired kitchen, looks like old lady lived in it for 20 years and never redecorated.

Previously I would have thought it cosmetic but it seems any work is expensive these days! Is it worth it or just better to stay and improve as I would save on stamp duty and bigger mortgage and moving costs.

Just spent £14k on a tiny bathroom and it took six weeks!