House renovation cost

[Mr Badger]

I may need to move house within the next year and so have started to look at what's on the market. Spotted a Victorian 4 bed semi that could work, but the current owner has been renting it out as flats. Aside from the whole place needing updating the layout would need changing, in particular the kitchens and bathrooms. There are 4 bathrooms in total and two kitchen areas, neither of which are where I would put one.

As I'm not currently in a position to move forward I don't want to start wasting the time of tradesmen etc. but does anyone have a rough idea what work of this this scale might cost to have done? Essentially remove at least one bathroom and the existing two kitchen areas and install a proper kitchen. May as well include decorating the whole place too!

 

[Janesy B]

Bathroom 10-15k, Kitchen 15-20k as a ballpark but easily could be much more. It's costing me about 2 grand a bedroom to DIY most things other than electrical and plastering work, I was getting quotes of 6k for a start to finish job on a smallish double bedroom a couple of years ago.

 

[tom_nieto]

This is going to depend on which part of the country you’re in, whether you need an architect to help with designs and whether you need to do anything structural. You might get away with just superficial work, but if it’s been converted properly into flats there might be quite a bit of work to do.

 

[Mr Badger]

Of course I could be wrong, but I was assuming that no serious design work or structural changes would be needed to take out bathrooms and kitchens to return them to being bedrooms and reception rooms. The single biggest job would seem to be installing a completely new kitchen in a better location if that involves new pipework etc. Just trying to get a sense of what it all might cost as I have never sought any quotes for this sort of work.

 

[Buffman]

Honestly it's variable on the level of finish etc and work you want. Very high level £100k to £150k is a reasonable amount for such a renovation but it's dependant on level of spec of finish and presume that you would be able to do some of the work yourself.


Remember dependent on circumstances you could stage it and do the first say £50k first and the rest over a number of years whilst saving at work.

 

[Rroff]

Depends a bit - you can get handymen who'll knock it up to a reasonable standard, but take a bit of time and you'd be best off doing the finishing touches yourself as most are good at doing the framework but not particularly sophisticated when it comes to a high quality final standard i.e. likely to bodge trim pieces, etc. and probably cost around what Janesy B said above - my parents had similar done and it cost around 40K I believe with them doing the finishing touches. Or you can call in professionals who'll do it much quicker and to a high standard but likely cost in the region of 100K once all is said and done.

Annoyingly prices have gone up loads since 2020 - we did a load of work in 2019 which cost like half what it would now!

 

[Hedge]

You should also look at neighbouring houses and see what they have been been selling for. Particularly large houses don't seem to be selling easily in the current market.

You could end up spending £150k on a house that won't return that investment.

 

[sigma]

Not worth it unless you can DIY or know someone who can do it.

 

[tamzzy]

Location matters too. You'd obviously pay more down south than up north.
If you are going to hire trades to do everything, I suspect this endeavour will be well north of 60-70k in the Midlands

 

[sigma]

Also, if it's been rented out there's a high change of it being bodged/poorly maintained, which will increase costs, costs you won't know about until you start. So i'd add 50% to any quote you get. It being an old house doesn't help either.

 

[sigma]

Not worth it unless you can DIY or know someone who can do it.

Get @dlockers on the case, he'll have it done in a month, easy.

 

[Noakesy85]

We're in the process of renovating and having our kitchen redone in our property up in Norfolk that we plan to move back into in August. The house was rented for the best part of 10 years so was in a pretty bad state when we finally got it back.

So far its cost 10k for the kitchen units and installation, 900 to get the trench dug out for the water mains, 1200 to get the water mains moved, 2k for the electrics, 3k to get the boiler moved and plumbed back in. The plasterer is in next week to skim the walls and ceilings ready for the second fix electrics.

I originally set aside 25k for the whole renovation but that also involved a fair amount of input from myself. Including ripping out the old kitchen (which is now storage and workbenches in the garage), taking old tiles off the walls etc. ive still got about ~7k left of the original budget but we plan to use most of that for new carpets in some of the worst areas, curtains and paint etc. By the end of it i can see the process costing around 30k and that includes doing a lot of the decorating and grunt work myself.

We also still need to get a Garden wall rebuilt a the front of the property as that was dangerous and we had to pull it down before it fell on someone. That's been estimated at about ~£600 and that's with me supplying the bricks (Re-used from old wall where possible)

 

[Mr Badger]

You should also look at neighbouring houses and see what they have been been selling for. Particularly large houses don't seem to be selling easily in the current market.

You could end up spending £150k on a house that won't return that investment.

Larger houses actually appear to be moving quite quickly around here. Two that I found of interest both sold before I could get a viewing arranged. Doing some more research shows that houses in the same road that are nicely up together with a fairly high state of finish do seem to be going for around £125K to £150K more than this one, perhaps pointing towards your £150K estimate for the work.

Location matters too. You'd obviously pay more down south than up north.
If you are going to hire trades to do everything, I suspect this endeavour will be well north of 60-70k in the Midlands

From a cost perspective, sadly it's definitely down south.