Help me roughly budget, o wise ones?

[LadyThompson]

I am on a tight budget and need to guesstimate how much for:

new bathroom (bath, sink, loo);

downstairs shower room (shower, small sink, loo);

Kitchen cupboards;

Carpets cleaned (can't afford new floorcovering yet I don't think - ALTHOUGH given that the place will be empty at first I wonder whether we will bother once we have finally moved in, so might be worth biting the bullet). Thoughts?

Painting throughout;

It's a cottage so modern stuff wouldn't really go.

Thank you! Think I can do it for less than £5k including fitting where necessary?

You can buy bathroom stuff very cheap on ebay and at salvage yards. Nice stuff!

It will be the fitting that pushes up the cost. look on victoriaplumb for bathroom stuff they seem to have a constant sale.

I think you should be able to do it though.

Yep, it'll be the fitting that will be where the 'hidden' costs lay. Are you doing some of it yourself....like the painting? As that will make £5k more realistic.

I find salvage stuff actually quite expensive - I live near a Lassco and I went at the weekend ....prices were But you should definately have a look - I find this website handy.

If the carpets look like something you'd keep for a while - (ie: they don't look like a multi-coloured 70s nightmare) then I'd get them cleaned.

Gosh - I reckon you're pushing it - BUT, I think it's do'able' if you do lots of research. My mate kitted out her place in France for around £3k using this place No idea where yo're based but i think these sort of places may be worth checking out - for furniture at least.

My DP is a builder/carpenter and he gets stuff for clients much more cheaply using the trade route. He has access to tons of lovely brouchures/catalogues and gets the client to chose and then he buys it. Is there a local builder/fitter type guy like him you could talk to when it comes to bathrooms?

HTH good luck and well done on the house

That is all really helpful, thank you veery much.

I am in the South East.

I have never heard of Victoriaplumb so will check that out - or the sites Jean linked to, which look good.

How much does it cost, v roughly, to get a bathroom fitted then? (I know it varies according to region).

I think we will have to do the painting ourselves - groan.

Forgot to say - be careful of Victoria Plumb - my DP gets a prof tiler magazine and is on the forum - Many prof tilers all agree they won't fit the stuff - and there seems to be an awful lot of negative press about them.

DP just fitted out a small bathroom (where the client was looking at Victoria Plumb, which made him look them up!) and usually charges about £25/30 per hour and was there a day. Simple job - there about 8 hours. No idea how that stacks up in the UK pricewise but in Bucks it's about average - to top end.

We've just had a new bathroom fitted and it cost about £700 in labour. However, it's a brand new bathroom so this did include some new pipework, a shower and a radiator plus fitting a vanity unit/toilet cabinet thing. If it was just replacing stuff I think it would have been a couple of hundred less. He also sourced all the sanitary ware, units, shower, radiator etc for us and let us have them at trade prices so we got really good quality stuff for much less than buying it from normal retail places.

Isn't there quite a lot you've left out? Don't you also need to buy tiles and bathroom flooring for both bathrooms? Also things like a towel holder, loo roll holder, etc? Is there already heating and lighting in these bathrooms? Is the electricity suitable for bathrooms?

If you're on a really tight budget, it's all the more important to put aside a contingency fund, as you're screwed if you don't have one. So at 10% you've got a budget of £4500.

Our local bathroom guy charges £25/hour which I'd say is cheap (also south east). I've had someone else quote £350 / day.

I wouldn't look in Salvage yards for budget furniture - I'd try Freecycle and Ebay for as much as possible.

You'd better paint and clean the carpets yourself, but don't underestimate how much paint costs, plus you may well need to buy all the extras that go with painting. Work that out first and then knock it off your budget.

That leaves you approx £4250 for doing a bathroom, shower room and kitchen.

So if it's 5 days to fit all that (seems a bit optimistic to me, but may be fine?), at £25/hour you're looking at approx £875, giving you approx £3400 to buy kitchen cabinets, 2 loos, 2 sinks, 1 shower, and anything else you've got to get. Very tight, but probably just about doable, esp if you can find bits on Freecycle!

Thanks Grendel, good point - there is already heating and lighting though.

I could find a little bit more than £5k I think - but not much. £7k at the very most.

This is going to be a lot tighter and tougher than I thought!

By the way, in the bathroom there's a bath, sink and loo already, and in the shower room there is a knackered old shower, loo and sink too, but they need ripping out and replacing.

We're about to buy somewhere that needs a new bathroom, toilet, kitchen, carpets, ceilings, just about everything.

We're in the South East and we've costed a 3m x 3m kitchen (L shaped floor cupboards) at £650 for the cupboards, worktop and sink from Ikea (actually turned out our favourite and proper wood one was the cheapest). We're not having wall cupboards though as we have a larder.

The bathroom, my Dad says he can get us a suite (British, ceramic etc) for £250 and a proper Aqualisa shower for £250. Tiles will be more but we've costed them at £15/m as not the cheapest we can find.

Dad's a plumber and will fit the kitchen so I can't help on costs for that I'm afraid, plus the bathroom costs are obviously trade prices.

New carpet will cost us less than £2500 but, that was quoted by someone who charges to fit and we've found someone who fits it for free and uses the same carpet.

I'd be impressed if you manage it, good luck!

i think 5k would be erm slightly on the lowside.

Well, HerHonesty - like I said, may be able to squeeze up to £7k but that is all we have (I am grateful to have that tbh) so we will just have to see what we can do

new bathroom (bath, sink, loo); 2000-3000 pounds if not too much plumbing to sort out

downstairs shower room (shower, small sink, loo); 2000 (more if no plumbing there)

Kitchen cupboards; 1500-2000 (depending how big but it could be more for expensive materials)

Carpets cleaned
Definitly clean, massive difference, shop around!

Painting throughout;
Not sure as I painted myself, cheapest paint is brilliant white 10 litre vat

You could do it for 7k but shopping around for discounted items or going to warehouses and doing lot of work yourself. I'd say 10K really but not luxurious materials.

agree with golden peach. also bear in mind that cheap stuff rarely works out good value in the long run. better of doing what you really need to do to make house liveable and then do the rest once in but go for quality.

Do all these things really need ripping out and replacing immediately? Rather than scrubbing to within an inch of their lives with the help of the 'How Clean is Your Home' book? I mean, how bad can they be?
Rather than buying the cheapest now, you might be better off to spend more on better quality, and do it all slower.

If you're going to do all the painting yourself, having the right tools makes a tremendous difference to the quality of finish, I find.

I think we need to have a long think, Grendelsmum. It hasn't completed yet. We may be able to limp along with the bathroom for a while (eg) but the shower room is gross.

What do you mean about the right tools for painting

Well, for example, you can get a special brush for painting windows, which I think genuinely does make the job easier. You can also get different shapes of sanding block, and having a pointy one with a handle makes sanding things down much easier, in my opinion at least.

Roller brushes have different lenghts of pile to paint different sorts of walls. You get different finishes using rollers and brushes, and different finishes from different sorts of paint. Cheap roller brushes from the pound shop give a crap finish, whereas good roller brushes make it look nice.

Different sorts of paint need to be washed off the paintbrushes in different ways - water or white spirit.

There's a great book called 'Fix It Good' which tells you in words of one syllable how to do all sorts of things around the house, including painting. I really recommend buying that and following it. There's also a book called something like 'The Collins Guide to Beginning DIY' which is full of the sort of things which are vital to know but don't get mentioned otherwise, such as "remember to buy enough before you start", and "remember to cover everything up carefully". Both are blatantly intended for women new to DIY, but with them you can do just about anything.

I really would scrub the bathroom and shower room fanatically first and repaint them both before you actually decide to replace either. You might also try hanging up nice mirror, etc. I've done this and it makes a tremendous difference. Did you know that denture cleaning tablets dropped down a loo will remove grimy limescale in the pan?

Best of luck!