Moving into a house that needs renovating - limited budget - what can one live without?

[LadyThompson]

Ok, so....

1. Needs work on the roof and chimney so a few grand has to go on that immediately.

1. It will have no kitchen (no cooker, units, fridge etc) so money will have to go on that.

That leaves

1. a grotty bathroom with a bath with a crack in it

1. a grotty shower room. Not even sure if the shower works.

1. A solid fuel burner powering the central heating (ie, radiators but no boiler)

1. Yucky poo stinky carpets.

Have enough money for 1 and probably 2, with about £3000 over to spread over what's left. Everything else will have to be done over time. What would you do?

You could probably do the bathroom suite and a new bath tub with the money?

No experience of the heating but my guess would be you would need that asap?

Carpets could just get ripped out for time being?

We might try to live with the heating this winter and see how it goes. It is operational...

Carpets - I guess we will have to rip out or clean somehow.

Best quote we got for heating a 3 bed, 1 bath house was about £2500 incl radiators, boiler installation etc, and that was with push fit plastic pipes under the floor rather than copper. You might manage a cheap replacement bath until you can save up for the rest but ime when you start doing work on a house like this you suddenly find that there's a lot more wrong than you first though = more money to put it right.

What's under the carpets?

I'd be inclined to say rip up the carpets and then recarpet your main living room now and slowly over the years get carpet for the rest of the house.

I rented a carpet cleaner for the weekend once and it didn't cost much at all, not more than £50.

I lived without a kitchen for a year with a newborn baby too

We had a sink & drainer (no units underneat) freestanding cooker, fridge, microwave - freezer outside.........

I would start looking on freecycle & ebay you may be able to get some stuff to make do with.

I would buy a new bath to replace the cracked one and leave the rest of the bathroom for when you have more money.

Rip out the carpets - if you can't afford new ones yet, replace with cheap seagrass type until you can get good quality ones (or other flooring).

Leave the shower room 'till later as well as the rest of the bathroom. You may find you need to change some of the plumbing, so that could get expensive, and you don't want to find out when half of it has been ripped out and you don't have any cash to spare.

For the kitchen, I would consider freestanding units. That way you can get the bare minimum for now, and add more units when you can.

Some really useful tips here, thanks....

I ripped out the carpets and cleaned the floors and left them as they were for a few years - bung cheap rugs down

I would sort out the shower - should only cost 500 perhaps

TBH if you only have 3k left then I would leave ALL of those things, and keep the money for when something goes wrong that REALLY needs attention (i.e. more roof leak/heating breaking)

I would change the bath because of the crack (could get for £150 in B&Q) and clean up and cheaply redo one room (new cheap carpet and new paint on the walls), so that you have were to ?hide? when you fed up with everything!

you could probably pick up a 2nd hand bathroom suite cheaply - we just got one for free from friend upgrading a property they rent out - try freecycle/freegle?

agree with others re carpets, we lived with bare concrete floors for a long time, replaced living room carpet first and decorated this room so we had somewhere nice we could sit in while the rest of the house was a dump!

we also had no kitchen when we moved here, for a long time we used a very large box (from a washing machine or similar) as a make shift unit. I cut a hole in the front so i could access some crates underneath it and the top made a surprisingly sturdy worksurface.

it might be worth getting one fo those small portable elctric heaters so you can still keep warm over winter if your heating turns out to be crap.

now this house is lovely, we've just bought another wreck...so we'll be starting again - in a very similar situation to you as won't have funds till we sell this house but can't move in until we have functioning bathroom and kitchen.

scuse typing - have baby on lap grabbing my arm

Do the roofing asap. You can live without the rest.
A kitchen, grab a cooker off ebay or freecycle, use any table as work top and throw some shelves up. You can get a bath from your local dump as a quick replacement. carpets rip out and throw cheap rugs or off cut carpets down (freecycle/ebay again). You want to get your heating done before you start on the interior as it can be really disruptive and messy.

If I were you I would pull all the carpets up and leave the floors as they are for the timebeing (unless Freegle comes up with anything wonderful). We lived in a flat with no flooring down for a couple of years as other things were more essential.

Sort the roof and chimney first thats the most important
search ads for second hand baths.
If the carpets are really vile (ie unsalvagable) rip them up and either put rugs down or buy some end of roll remnants and fit them yourself.
Freecycle for cooker, and even kitchen units..lots of people put new kitchens in and pull out perfectly acceptable kitchen units and put them on freecycle, better than no kitchen.
The heating will probably be fine..we lived in a house with solid fuel central heating and although it was a pain making the parkray up (and messy), it was effective heating