Buying and living in a house that needs everything doing

[Skillmister]

I've been doing a room (or two) at a time. I couldn't face stripping the entire house and living with that for 6+ months.

 

[D.P.]

Definitely don;t want to do that while living there, so will need to rent somewhere.

then you need to factor in the cost of doing it yourself. You don't work for free. Spending time refurbishing has a very high cost, something more important than money which is the time with your child, time with wife, time with friends, time to enjoy your life.

 

[samcat]

Hi,

Has anyone experienced anything similar to this, buying a house and living in it with a young child and it needs a hell of a lot of work doing, is it possible, will it be extremely stressful or wont it be that big of a deal?

Here is a list of just some of the stuff that needs doing -

The whole house needs electrical wiring and new Consumer Unit

Boiler install to replace electric setup

The whole house needs radiators and related plumbing

Gas supply to kitchen, boiler and fire place

New kitchen

New bathroom

Knock through wall from lounge to dining room

Fully decorating

I think thats the majority of it! Just looking for similar experiences really from people that have managed to live their lives in the house whilst it was being done.

Thanks

Talk to a good local spark/plumber and get quotes/estimates for the full rewire/new consumer unit and new central heating jobs when the house is empty. Make sure they are capable/comfortable with working with each others work. Make sure that you have a timeline in place that works for both of them (ie plumber may not want to work before some of the power is in, or may want to start a few days before sparky due to X or Y).

Might be worth doing knocking wall through and making good before they start.

The jobs may require floorboards up etc so budget for carpet replacement... maybe just go with budget ones now until the savings pot has recovered.

Get this done before move in. If you have to camp with relatives/go on a lil holiday with your stuff in storage while it all happens then so be it... its part of the cost.

After that its room by room redecorating, with some jobs sounding bigger than others but nothing quite as disruptive as the 'big jobs'.

Trust me, do it before move in. Its 50x more of a PITA once you are in.

 

[MassiveJim]

one room I would do whilst living in it, whole house as others have said I would just add a couple of grand budget for renting elsewhere.

I did our loft myself and it took 8 months, this is going from a bare "normal" loft to a decorated room with a velux in it. (structural work, velux fitting and plastering were done by trades)
I was working evenings and weekends on it

I can't imagine how long a whole house reno would take.

 

[Relentless81]

Thanks guys but its a no go, just reading some of these comments has put me right off

 

[eidolon]

I've just done it although just with my girlfriend and not with a small child.
We bought a house needed *everything*. We literally took the entire thing back to brick and just left the outer shell then replaced the lot. Walls, ceilings, floors, electrics, plumbing, windows, doors, plastering, kitchen, bathroom, stairs etc. It's quite a big 3 storey house so I was able to get a couple of rooms livable first before I moved in then work on the rest of the house while camping out in those rooms. I think the hardest part was the constant dirt. I filled 10 large skips so you can imagine how much muck there was.

It's been worth it though, I've got a house which is exactly how I want it and I know that it's been done correctly and hopefully should last whereas if you buy a house that looks pretty on the surface you never know what it's hiding.

One thing to bear in mind, and it's what everyone says, but be prepared to go massively over budget and over time as you'll invariably find things that you hadn't allowed for plus when you start with a blank canvas you'll get feature creep. What starts off as a simple ceiling replacement soon turns into raising the ceiling, adding a few Velux windows, maybe some speakers too etc.

 

[Ugley_Matt]

We did this with our house although before we married and had kids, so i was living in it and doing the work evenings and weekend for about a year. The one regret i have in hindsight was not completely finishing one of the bedrooms. We had a total rewire, new boiler and completely plastered so the whole house was dusty or damp. We should have finished one of the bedrooms so that at the end of the day i had a "normal" room i could go in, shut the door and "forget "about it all.

 

[Rroff]

I filled 10 large skips so you can imagine how much muck there was.

They are stripping out a pub on my road at the moment, back to brick, etc. (turning it into apartments/flats) last few days they've been going through 2-3x what I think are 40 yard skips per day (by comparison the large skips of the type people usually think of as a skip are 12 yard ones).

 

[eidolon]

They are stripping out a pub on my road at the moment, back to brick, etc. (turning it into apartments/flats) last few days they've been going through 2-3x what I think are 40 yard skips per day (by comparison the large skips of the type people usually think of as a skip are 12 yard ones).

Mine were just 16yd ones, the largest they had without having to get roll on/roll off which wasn't possible due to space.

 

[Rroff]

This is the one I'm talking about:

Its amazing how fast they've been filling them. Can't really see it in the image but the upstairs windows at the front are all open and they've just been chucking things out of them constantly all day for the last few days into the skip.

 

[BigBoy]

We filled 3 9 ton grab trucks just stripping the concrete out of the back garden... The house was I think 5 3.5 ton flatbeds full, the 10 fur trees filled 16 flatbeds when we cut them back, proper mental how much waste can be created!