1970's house - complete refurbish cost estimate

BailMeOut

Hello

Looking at a 1970's bungalow on edge of a small town that is structurally sound. Nothing in house is salvageable other than walls and roof. Everything else needs to be replaced and updated. The house is currently still being lived in.

House needs proper insulation, new central heating, all new windows/doors, new kitchen, bathroom + additional en-suite and some room reconfigurations.

Its a 4 bed, living, kitchen/dining, utility at about 200 sq metres.

Attic is quite big and tall and can easily accommodate two small dormer bedrooms and a bathroom. It has a south facing roof so adding solar water panel water heater would probably be a good idea.

Anyone want to make an guesstimate on the high spec and low spec ballpark to fix this house up?

Thanks!

ba

To be honest someone's 'guess' won't be much use to you. Would be better hiring someone to provide drawings and Schedule of Work for more accurate pricing. Dormers, i believe, are not exempted development and will require planning permission from the local authority. The drawings produced for pricing could double up as planning permission drawings if you wanted to keep professional fees down.

Sorry, but i am not trained to price construction works. Best of luck though.

BailMeOut

ba wrote: »

To be honest someone's 'guess' won't be much use to you. Would be better hiring someone to provide drawings and Schedule of Work for more accurate pricing. Dormers, i believe, are not exempted development and will require planning permission from the local authority. The drawings produced for pricing could double up as planning permission drawings if you wanted to keep professional fees down.

Sorry, but i am not trained to price construction works. Best of luck though.

Thanks Ba

I do not own the house and am trying to work out an offer price. If I thought that this renovation could come in at say between 100k and 120k for low to high spec then I know what my max offer price would be based on my budget.

Based on this I would be offering less than 50% of the very optimistic asking price (IMO) so it is probably a long shot and thus my reluctance to pay anyone at this stage.

Ddad

We renovated and extended a 1980's bungalow. We added 500 sq ft of extensions (2). Complete replumb and substantial demolition and reconfiguration. Pumped cavities. additional attic insulation. repainting. replastering and complete sanitary refits etc. All new windows with a lot of additional glazing.Not a lot of change out of 150K, ouch. We now have a B1 rated bungalow.

Was it worth it economically? No. Do we have the house we wanted in the area we wanted? Now,yes. Before we were always looking at substantial compromise.

BailMeOut

Ddad wrote: »

We renovated and extended a 1980's bungalow. We added 500 sq ft of extensions (2). Complete replumb and substantial demolition and reconfiguration. Pumped cavities. additional attic insulation. repainting. replastering and complete sanitary refits etc. All new windows with a lot of additional glazing.Not a lot of change out of 150K, ouch. We now have a B1 rated bungalow.

Was it worth it economically? No. Do we have the house we wanted in the area we wanted? Now,yes. Before we were always looking at substantial compromise.

Thanks Ddad, sounds like you have a great home.

What is the size of your house now?

Would you say you did it to a high spec for the 150 grand? e.g. hardwood floods, non PVC windows, stone counters, recessed lighting, etc... Also did you use an architect and put the job out to bid or did you self project manage and build?

Ddad

BailMeOut wrote: »

Thanks Ddad, sounds like you have a great home.

What is the size of your house now?

Would you say you did it to a high spec for the 150 grand? e.g. hardwood floods, non PVC windows, stone counters, recessed lighting, etc... Also did you use an architect and put the job out to bid or did you self project manage and build?

Yeah, I'm chuffed to bits. After years of looking at overpriced badly finished rubbish we bit the bullet and bought this place with the full intention of doing the works to it.

We tiled a lot of the house with polished porcelain. We have good quality laminates in the bedrooms and walnut semi in the living room. Between the bathrooms kitchen dining and utility we've 1300 sq ft of tiles. The house is now 2100 sq ft four bed, study, sittingroom, bathroom, wiw and ensuite off master and big kitchen diner with utility. I've only a bit of recessed lighting as the house has only 8ft ceilings and I feel they bring down the ceiling. I hate changing the bulbs as well. I had stone counters in a rented house over the last couple of years and I really disliked them. Hard to get clean looking, expensive and they break stuff. I prefered having the 3k to spend on a better quality kitchen. I'd rather haver the artificial counters and bosch rather than granite and beko.

We have big aluminium windows at the South and SW elevations and have really high quality PVC at the E and N elevations. The budget didn't stretch to aluclad.We have solid oak joiney throughout and we used stair tread to get extra thick window boards which work as window seats.

The budget also included a stove and 60 evacuated tubes for heating and hot water, a complete replumb with no underfloor joins and feature rads in certain rooms.

The arcitect cost 10k for all stages and he was a great guy to deal with. Did the BER for free and countless drafts of the drawings. Went out to tender with four builders and the lds we went with were great. If I had one piece of advice it'd be to spec and price as much as possible before the build. I mean down to light fittins and door handles that way it's easier to control the budget. Oh and shop around and then shop around some more.

BailMeOut

thank again Ddad

Based on what you did a reasonable gauge / ballpark would be around EUR75 per sq foot for a house of this era to gut and refurbish.

I made my offer to seller based on my budget less my rough estimate to refurbish house and it was rejected so project going nowhere at moment!

Ddad

The thing about the Irish market is that the quality of the finish and build in the house is rarely properly reflected in the price. I had the house valued and a nerby house that hasn't a thing done to it in 15 years with a similarly sized garden and square footage is asking slightly less than the valuataion. A mate of mine is an estate agent and her thinking is that if you want the nice things great but don't expect to see taht reflected in the value of the house. Take for instance the BER cert. All of the houses with BER pending are valued before the BER is known. Surely these values should affect the price?

Ah well I suppose that's just the way we think:rolleyes:

Corron

Hi Bailmeout did you go ahead with this project? Looking at something similar at the moment.