Doer-Upper Budget

[PocketDinosaur]

Considering making an offer on a do-er upper, 3 bed Victorian terrace in South London.

I am very risk averse but we are priced out of being able to buy a turnkey property where we currently live and want to buy.

The house is probate so has been neglected. It needs a full rewire, boiler replacement and new radiators. Windows are original sash with secondary glazing put in. The kitchen needs ripped out and started again. The layout and size of it are good- it's big but ideally needs the wall knocked down between wc and bathroom and wall between kitchen and dining room (unsure if these are load bearing or need a small rsj).

The roof is old and there is water damage on the first floor ceilings and in the front bay (wallpaper peeling off and ceiling very stained). We've asked the estate agent for information about what caused it and if it's been rectified.

Neither DH or I are against something that needs work- it's what we'd prefer to turnkey but this is at the worse end of doer upper that we'd be willing to take on and I'm not sure if we can afford it.

We're very fortunate that we can stay with relatives whilst we have work done and I'm trying to make a reno list and budget- is this horribly naive in terms of immediate work and price?

Roof (and sorting out cause of water damage) 20k
Rewire 8k
Bathroom 10k
Kitchen 20k
Replastering 6k

Are these estimates unrealistic? (Expecting a resounding yes but forever hopeful)

Hugely unrealistic. Even friends with the cheapest builder and expertise in construction spent easily double that (painted themselves).

I think your well out on your figures, especially for London, by a lot!

Your likely in a catch 22 of having not brought the property so no one will waste their time and come and quote.

Do you know any tradesmen who could informally give you a quote?

Finding someone (a company) to project manage it will cost more but safe a lot of time & stress and get the jobs done right.

I'd always say double it. Your costs actually don't seem too far off. However there will always be extra costs unbudgeted, ie we also needed a new boiler and heating system £15k, flooring and decorating, new front door £3k. New internal doors £3k. We are living in our reno which is so much more difficult.

I missed the London bit, yes, It will br much more expensive then. I live in a cheap town in the North which made prices more reasonable.

In Yorkshire I spent more than £15k on a rewire and that was over 10 years ago albeit on 5 bed house.

you need to at least double all your figures but maybe triple it

figure out what is essential to get the house habitable (eg electrics if they are unsafe) and then do work as you can afford it. It’ll be worth it in the long term.

PS, you've missed off:
Re plumb & heating
Windows and doors (external)
Doors internal
Fixtures and fittings (will be run away costs)
Flooring
all of these are significant costs to add to your budget.

I think your prices are about right for 5 years ago, you will be looking at double that now.

15 years ago I burned through £100K on a similar project (except I didn't need to touch the roof). God knows what it would cost now. I am not in London.

Your roof is the big risk there - in London you could easily be quoted £20k just for the scaffolding - I’d budget £50k

re wire £10-£15k depending on amount of distribution boards etc

bathroom - doable for £10k….just

kitchen - £20k would be budget entry incl appliances

re plastering - is this throughout? Possibly doable for £6k

you have missed the boiler and the radiators - that could easily be another £10k plus

I don’t think people can say for sure you’re being unrealistic just online.

I would say (being 8 years into a real doer upper 😂) - triple your time estimation and double your budget estimation. And have a good overflow fund.

The satisfaction is immense- I’ve loved it. It’s also been v v v v difficult. But we’ve also done most of it ourselves.

can you take a builder to go and view it with you???
best of luck xxx

I think it depends how much you can do yourself. Im in Brighton so prices are not dissimilar and we move in tomorrow to a renovation project.

We have costed everything up as we have about 10k now and the rest will be as and when.

We need cavity wall ties as the only essential which is booked for April at £700. Bathroom has a disabled bathroom currently, new one £2k.

Replace doors in kitchen £1300

double glazing has blown £55 per pane to replace. The full replaster and decorate, almost free paint is £27 for 5 litres

There's no need to go mad. £20k on a kitchen is madness same £10k on a bathroom

It’s also worth considering how handy you are and whether you are capable of good design.
I did a devol inspired kitchen with IKEA units; painted the stone walls with chalk wash, lighting from Sklum online, bought new fridge /freezer/ dishwasher and a huge second hand old range. Bought expensive brass handles and also brass rails on shelving, salvaged old wood for shelving / coverings. Total cost was about 7k. I built and fitted it myself though so no cost there.
I say this as someone’s quoted 20k above minimum for kitchen - you can do it for much less than that if you’re handy. xo

You’re gonna need a min of 120k I reckon.

you prices are too low. Whatever you think it will cost you should add at least another 50% and have a contingency pot. Think about what you would do if you actually run out of money and the project is only halfway through, unfortunately many people watch programs on TV and think they could just go ahead and do it. If it’s the first time you’ve ever done it, this is gonna be a very steep learning cover for you. Have you had a survey yet? That might give you some more information?

Difficult to say without understanding the condition of the house but a rewire for £8k is optimistic (!!) DP is an electrician in SE London and would charge considerably more than that.

Remember that your wall in the kitchen could potentially be a party wall and you need to deal with surveyors / your neighbours and the party wall act before removing it.

Is the above what you think you need to spend to live in it? So you’re happy to wait to do the rest of the work?

Also I would urge you to do a L3 survey and a drain survey. Drain surveys cost so little but can tell you so much about a house - particularly in south London where everything is sinking!

We’re mid refurb on 3 bed house on the south coast- 20 miles ish from Brighton. We started in July this year.

Rewire-10k. It could have been cheaper but we went for ‘fancy’ sockets etc.

Although, the electricians carved up the walls when they did the rewire, we’ve filled the holes ourselves and lining paper has covered those sins really well, which has saved us needing to replaster.

Roof- 10k ish but really depends on your situation.

Windows -15k. Again it really depends on how many windows you have. We were planning on living with the windows (they had secondary glazing too) and doing them at the end. However, they were so mouldy that we moved them up the project list.

New Boiler & some Rads - 9k

Kitchen -we took our appliances with us and so just need new units and work top. We’ve priced up on DIY kitchens and it’s around £2k. We’ll fit it ourselves.

Bathroom- we haven’t priced up for this yet.

Flooring. We’ve done 3 main rooms so far. 2 x Lvt and one carpet. It’s come in around 3k. Someone else is fitting this for us. We looked at doing flooring ourselves, but we wanted these rooms done before. Christmas. We did the two toilets’ floors ourselves and it was prob less than 100 in total.

Like other posters say, if you’re handy it really cuts down on the cost. Also, if the house is liveable and you don’t mind roughing it for a while, it is doable. Living in a house whilst you get to ‘know’ it is actually quite handy. We’ve changed some of our plans, as we don’t use the house in the way that we envisaged at the start.

Double it OP!
we live in London - did a full renovation and extension of a house last modernised in the 80s in 2021 - our builder (who was the most reasonable out of 4 quotes we got) now tells us it would cost us double that to do the same job due to cost of materials and overheads

Putting your cost estimates aside, which I also agree are too optimistic.
I think you are better to wait if you possibly can. 2026 is likley to be a continuation of prices falling and if you could spend another year saving you might not feel as badly priced out as you do now - by the end of the 2026 year. Have you seen the drop in values just reported by Rightmove ? I think this will continue throughout the year and affordability will come back in to line with asking prices quite substantially.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/average-house-price-6-695-000100433.html

Have you had an electrician to inspect the electrics? In both renovations we have done, the electrical units needed replacing, but the actual wiring was fine and had been done in the 80s /90s. We still had to spend several thousand adding lights, sockets etc, fans.

Plastering - was that for the whole house, or just the upstairs with water damage and making good the wall removal downstairs? We did ours a year ago and it was roughly £2k per large room. Also extra for our bays (£1k each roughly) as needed special insulation as they were leaky and damp also.

Bathroom it depends what you’re putting in. We did one with a walk in shower and a bath that was about £6.5 k labour, and one which was just a shower, loo and sink that was only £3.5k labour

Kitchen at £20k seems reasonable. Ours was a bit over that including fitting, but we have a big kitchen and went for stone countertops. Handmade Kitchens of Christchurch was about £11k for units in their default half price off sale, and looks massively more expensive than it was.

Removing a non load bearing wall was about 1.5k. However obviously flooring needed making good/replacing, and that was expensive. Removing a load bearing wall - depends on the rsj needed. One of ours was about £3k to remove and needed a small rsj (upstairs) and one was about £7k and needed footings dug out in the kitchen also.

It’s so variable. You can probably shop around for deals, and builders vary dramatically. I found it a lot cheaper to use my own electrician, own plumber, own plaster etc

Sale prices are really area specific. Not everywhere is falling in price. My part of south London hasn’t fallen. In fact it massively increased last year. I suspect it’ll happen again after Christmas as people are desperate to move here.

Yes your absolutely right, markets can be very area specific. We have had some falls here on the south coast, Northern Ireland seems to have done better than anywhere. What part of south London are you in that's holding up ?

I’d rather not be totally specific tbh but it’s zone 2. It’s a small area but has become very desirable over the last few years (because you could get a nice sized house for the price of a flat in other parts of London). That is no longer the case obviously but we’ve got people moving in from east London and places like Clapham who will have made a lot of money on their places before moving here. It has had a massive knock on effect.

I’ve lived here for nearly 10 years so have seen the area change. We literally just bought (2 weeks ago) so very familiar with the market - sold our flat in a couple of weeks but buying a house was a nightmare and it took nearly 18 months.

Roof likely to be the biggest expense short term. I would try to get into the loft and take some pictures for a builder to review. Mine is 50 year old and still standing proud. Issue is if the leak has been there for a while and the rafters have rotten.

The people saying double it…

Is it really going to cost £40k for a middle of the road kitchen? Parents had a mid sized kitchen done 2 years ago and it was £16k all in.

It’s been a few years since I did my last kitchen (2017) but, although there was a small element of diy, that came in at around 4K including appliances. I simply sourced it all myself, did much of the prep and hired fitters by the day.

Your quotes look fine, add 10-20 percent. We did renovations 2 years ago for similar, but I know trades. This was London zone 2.