Grotty house advise

Good luck OP

I moved into my first home in 2015. Nowhere near as bad but it was a full refurb having been run down for a good 10 years. skim the walls if you can afford it. The difference was not something I expected, it made a very old house look very fresh in a short time. We painted bright neural colours to start. Make a big list and try and tackle one room at a time rather than everything at the same time ( obviously so important stuff first)

good luck. I don’t envy you. We were fortunate enough to be living elsewhere for a month so I had three labourers plus myself and then some specific trades in for that time it was the most stressful month of my life and if you budget somthing just expect it to go over, sorry.
 
Been in 6 weeks now and progress is slow, things are happening now though which is nice.

First big thing to get sorted was getting the porch repaired and fit a new door since the old one was tacky, not air tight and looked like a jail door. It had also completely rotted since the guy had a leaking tile for 10 years and didn't fix it. If a kid had come and punched it, the whole thing would have just disintegrated. Fortunately the side extension has a door so we'd been using that till now.

So out with the old and in with the new.

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Inside

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Given the timbers were rotted and tiles broken we ripped them all out and got the porch rebuilt. New timbers, insulation, tiles, plasterboard, wiring, guttering fascias etc

Porch was finished today - Much happier with how it looks now - Rendering and soffits need sorting on the front but it looks much tidier:)

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Our living room was 10 degrees over the last few cold nights as half the rads are blocked and that porch was letting all the cold air in - Had a comfy 15 degrees last night :)

The best bit - We were about to order the exact same door, frame, style etc new for £1100 + fitting but found one on Facebook Marketplace......6 month old composite door with frame and side window but too big for the house is was on and they wanted to fit something smaller, it was 6cm too small for our dimensions but our builder said he'd make it work.

Had our builder go round to look at it and it was immaculate - £160 later for the lot and it's ours - Absolute bargain!

We also ripped up the master bedroom to get one room done before Christmas, as we're still sleeping on the floor in the fourth bedroom which is the cleanest room.

Old window was stuck open and looking at Google maps, had been for 10 years, most the glass was blown too so old window out

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New one in

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I won't even attempt plastering so plasterer is booked, as is new carpet but we could hear quite a bit from the neighbour, so I decided last minute to whip up a stud wall with some acoustic insulation. It's a big room so don't mind losing a bit of space for some noise reduction.

Electrics, studs, plasterboard all done ready for the plasterer on Monday, was bit of a rush getting all this done in the evenings but finally finished last night - I can hear them if I listen very carefully with my ear up against the wall......so big improvement, glad I did it :)

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To be continued.....
 
No pictures but a few updates, work was stupidly busy before xmas so struggled to find the time and motivation to do the house in what little of the evenings I had left when I got home.

- Master bedroom is done now apart from painting and fitting blinds
- Got a quote to knock out the bathroom downstairs fit a large RSJ and relocate the boiler ready for new kitchen
- Liked @Semple idea of making bedroom 3 bigger so are getting a quote in a few days to knock the walls down/rebuild while we're away for a week in July. Will reduce the master slightly but worth it for a bigger 3rd room.
- Started ripping out upstairs bathroom, will be ordering that in the next week or so

Still not regretting our purchase......yet :D
 
Hi funky melon. We are literally following in your footsteps. About to put an offer in on a house extremely similar to yours. Just wondering if you had a blog if your progress and how everything turned out? How long did it take you? Approx costs? Are we stupid to even do this? Reading some of these comments we certainly do t have £60,000 to do this house up. Any tips, info, experience, photos would be massively helpful. Thanks
 
Spaniel81 said:
Hi funky melon. We are literally following in your footsteps. About to put an offer in on a house extremely similar to yours. Just wondering if you had a blog if your progress and how everything turned out? How long did it take you? Approx costs? Are we stupid to even do this? Reading some of these comments we certainly do t have £60,000 to do this house up. Any tips, info, experience, photos would be massively helpful. Thanks
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Wow, it's been a while since I've updated this thread. I'll get some updates written soon :)

Regarding your question, you have 2 options IMO...

1: Buy it and get traders in to tackle the worst of it before you move in. This is ideal but requires a lot of money up front which in my case I didn't have.

2: Move in with a 'can do' approach and tackle most of the work yourself, this is what I've done so far and at times it's not easy as you're essentially living in a gross house - Just have to remind yourself that Rome wasn't built in a day!

I quite often get deflated by the sheer amount of time and money needed, especially when friends my age are getting married and starting families etc and we can't realistically do that yet because of what we need to spend on this place but it will be worth it in the long run.

Make sure you look at ceiling value as well, you may not be buying it to do it up and flip but I doubt you'll want to spend thousands more over the years than it's ever going to be worth when you come to sell it.

Our neighbour sold their house last year for around £30k more than we paid for ours and it's quite literally half the size so I'm hoping we'll make a decent amount on this when it comes to selling.
 
We’re going to have to get traders in as I’m pregnant and my partner is disabled. Also have a toddler too. I’m just getting a bit nervous as people have said that if you can’t get read of the smell and nicotine/tar it bleeds through the paint and we’ll need to remove all walls and replaster we definitely don’t have enough for that. Again like you close to our budget leaving £10-20,000 to do all carpets cleaning prep painting and probably a new kitchen and skirtings. Trying to gut as much as we can. Bathroom will have to wait for a good few years. Think it’s possible? How did your smoke problem end up? I remember at the beginning saying you weren’t going to replaster the walls?
 
Getting a room plastered is one of the favourite bits for me, it seems so cheap and makes such a big difference. We're getting rooms plastered now that probably could be repaired / filled where needed but it's just nice to have a completely perfect canvas for the whole room. We pay our guy £200 in labour + materials. On a standard 4m*3m bedroom that's coming in at about £250 total. For the sake of £250 and me not having to worry about filling holes, bits behind radiators looking rubbish, cracks, etc.... it just seems a no-brainer to me. I figure we'll only need to do it once as well so it's a small outlay in my mind.

Our house had been smoked in for 40 years by the previous owner - stripping the woodchip wallpaper turned the water Lucozade orange from the nicotine in the walls so it was horrible. The smell is now completely gone from plastering and that's without us changing any carpets yet.
 
oh crikey ok well that sounds manageable! I thought replastering a whole house would be about £10,000. So house has 8 rooms and large hallway and stairway so if you by your average room cost that would be about 2750! Bonza!! That is more manageable!

so 5000 kitchen
2000 white goods
3000 replastering
1000 painting?
5000 carpets and underlay (guess)

hmmm yeah may have to rethink. We also have solicitors, building survey, morgage fees, removals to pay for... don’t think we can afford this

thank you for your help. Hope you find time to update with pics. Would be fab to see how you got on
 
Spaniel81 said:
oh crikey ok well that sounds manageable! I thought replastering a whole house would be about £10,000. So house has 8 rooms and large hallway and stairway so if you by your average room cost that would be about 2750! Bonza!! That is more manageable!

so 5000 kitchen
2000 white goods
3000 replastering
1000 painting?
5000 carpets and underlay (guess)

hmmm yeah may have to rethink. We also have solicitors, building survey, morgage fees, removals to pay for... don’t think we can afford this

thank you for your help. Hope you find time to update with pics. Would be fab to see how you got on
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If I could offer some perspective, you don't have to do that all at once. If you've got a working kitchen then you don't need to rush into that. Having a bedroom that you can retreat to, as someone else mentioned, is IMO essential. So I would prioritise that along with having a bathroom that you feel comfortable in.

The other stuff can be done in time.
 
How do you do that copy and post original comment?


Thanks dirty chinchilla. Unfortunately we’d need to do it all before we moved in as I’ll have a newborn baby with me. The dangers of third hand smoke from leaching toxins and cot death has a high correlation and I don’t want to take any chances. We’ll need to get rid of as much of the THC we can get out before we move in. I suppose I could plastic off the kitchen and never take baby in there until we can do it later.
 
Spaniel81 said:
How do you do that copy and post original comment?
Click to expand...

Hit the 'Quote' button at the bottom right


Spaniel81 said:
Thanks dirty chinchilla. Unfortunately we’d need to do it all before we moved in as I’ll have a newborn baby with me. The dangers of third hand smoke from leaching toxins and cot death has a high correlation and I don’t want to take any chances. We’ll need to get rid of as much of the THC we can get out before we move in. I suppose I could plastic off the kitchen and never take baby in there until we can do it later.
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If you can't re-plaster right away then use sugar soap mixed with water. It's cheap as chips and will get the worst of the nicotine out. Our kitchen was terrible and smelt disgusting. We spent probably around a week sugar soaping all the walls, ceilings, cupboards etc getting it as clean as possible, then primed everything with this stuff...

Zinsser B-I-N White Multi-surface Matt Primer, 2.5 | DIY at B&Q

It's not cheap but it's bloody good! Smell is now completely gone and we haven't even painted over the top of it yet, make sure you wear a proper mask when applying it though as it's quite nasty. Also rip out carpets, there's little you can do with those.
 
Spaniel81 said:
oh crikey ok well that sounds manageable! I thought replastering a whole house would be about £10,000. So house has 8 rooms and large hallway and stairway so if you by your average room cost that would be about 2750! Bonza!! That is more manageable!
Click to expand...

Yup, it's less than you think and makes the biggest difference. Anything like stairs / hallway I'd normally assume 2 days as the size will be bigger than you expect and more 'cutting in' and labour. Our living room was also 2 days but that's 7m*4m. Every other room has been a single day (£200 labour) + materials, based in Surrey as well.

I'd guess £5000 for your kitchen is way under unless it's very small, we spent about £7k on our last kitchen and that was 3m*3m and I got all the trades in myself and ordered everything online. Equally £5000 for carpets seems way over but you may want really expensive stuff.

Underlay is super cheap, THIS is the best stuff and is £600 for 100sqm so you probably won't need much more than that (again, depending on the size of the house). Fitting we've been paying £50 for a standard square room (4m*3m). Stairs, hallways etc... will be much more. Then carpet cost is whatever you decide, starting at £10 per sqm up to about £50 per sqm. Work out your sqm that needs carpetting and then estimate based on say £30 sqm for carpet, £600 for the whole house for underlay, £75 a room fitting and misc bits (door bars) and say a few hundred for stairs and hallways.

Oh, we moved in when my son was 9 months old and since then we've had another. I'd say we managed to get rid of about 50% of the smell in the first month with lots of airing of the house, candles everywhere and stripping the worst wallpaper off ASAP (this makes the biggest difference).
 
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