Is £188k a realistic budget for a 4,446 sq ft refurb?

[PedanticBuilder]

15 hours ago, Spinny said:

Interesting to see peoples ideas on the sequence of rooms. I'd say a lot depends on just what things are currently like in different rooms. When we moved in over 30 years ago we started with the living room because it was just too depressing to sit in there. The rest of the house needed doing BUT we lived with it and bathed the kids in the existing bathroom's yellow plastic bath with a cracked side panel. It was 8 years before we did the bathroom. But we didn't have any capital as you do -  however although you have capital to spend the work will be paced by your labour availability.

 

Fabric of the building is definitely good to do, but there is a balance and phasing to think about there too. You can probably spend a lot of money - all new windows and external doors, new roof, insulation, rewire and plumb whole house, new floors and u/floor heating everywhere, new ceilings and replaster everywhere etc. But then it could be an awful long time before you even have one finished room to relax in. Some of these things can be done piecemeal - e.g. rewiring can be done room by room, circuit by circuit, or floor by floor etc. We have one consumer unit for most of the house, and another for the new extension and adjacent areas. Or you can do first fix but leave 2nd fix. If you know what the overall plan is, it can be built out in stages. And the ladies like to have somewhere nice to sit in and to do their interior design thing with.

 

Yes you can say it is inefficient because a professional refurb would never be done that way - they would strip the whole house, trades come in and do the whole house, everywhere is a filthy dusty building site for many months on end, eventually the finishing trades come in and suddenly you get the whole swan at once. But try living in that while it is happening !

 

The spending choices are going to be really tough - do you spend up on a nice sofa for the sitting room - or go ikea and spend up on high density plasterboard - bog standard rads - or designer ones etc etc.

 

Exciting though.

 

Yeah absolutely, this will take a while and we dont want to live on a cosntruction site! So some things will be inefficient but practical. But certainly is exciting putting our own stamp on it