House reno diaries: our 3 month plan

On April Fools’ day when we got the keys for our forever home, we were under no illusion that we had a massive job on our hands. When I look back now, the scale of what we achieved in just three months is quite overwhelming. We didn’t just have one, but two massive jobs! As with any great tasks, if you try and tackle it in one go you’ll get totally buried. So it was really important for us to break down the house renovations into bite-sized chunks. One thing that helped us massively with this was the full property survey we had carried out. Many people would have run a mile seeing our survey as thick as the yellow pages full of recommendations – we saw it as a to-do list! But the survey flagged up some important issues that helped us to prioritise works. It’s all about figuring out what is urgent and what can wait.

We had a three month deadline as my husband was starting a new job in June and so we needed to be in so that he could give his new role his full attention. We also had a newborn as well as a two year-old and seven year-old… none of these life changes were planned to all happen at once! But we knew that we were laying the foundations for our future and so we had to just get stuck in! I’ve mentioned in a previous post ‘how we jumped the housing ladder to buy our forever home‘ that we stretched ourselves massively just buying this place. There wasn’t much left in the pot to carry out the works and so planning, budgeting and prioritising was key.

As there were two houses, we decided to live in one while we renovated the house that we’d ultimately end up living in. We bought a cooker and fridge off eBay for about £60 to use temporarily. The five of us slept on mattresses in the sitting room, we stored all of our stuff in the living room, we used one bedroom as a ‘floor-drobe’ and the other as a lego room! We were pretty much squatting… but honestly the hardest part was not having internet for the first two months!

The choice to not live in a house whilst renovating means that we could just crack on and do the work much faster without worrying about the dust and chaos! Our goal was to make the house warm, dry, clean and safe. Even though we were focusing on getting moved in – we did have our long-term plan at the back of our minds with every element of the renovation. The motto ‘do it well, do it once’ is a good one to follow! As we weren’t making any structural changes to the property, we weren’t delayed by any planning applications. We also weren’t planning on making any changes to the front which is in a conservation area.

It took us a couple of weeks to get settled in and really put a plan together as you can see above, but the plumbers started immediately in installing a boiler, laying all the pipes and radiators in each room. We’d already picked out our radiators and calculated the BTUs so they arrived the day after we moved in. We then had all the electrics tested and a new fuse board installed. Luckily the existing wiring was all sound! The water plumbing had quite a few issues however and we had rising damp in the kitchen (you can spot it below) as the external ground level was higher than internally. We made the choice to totally strip out the kitchen and bathroom and redo the plumbing and wiring. At the same time I dug away the border that runs along the length of the kitchen so that it was at the same level. To the side of the kitchen its all been concreted and because there’s a well there somewhere, we need to get a topographical survey carried out before we dig it all out. We don’t know if the well was filled or not and it’s too risky to get a kango and start drilling blindly!

If we had the time and the budget, we would have had the whole house done. It would have been a ‘nice to have’ rather than a necessity as it would have been purely cosmetic. So we just filled, patched, sanded and painted all the other rooms. I kept things simple and painted everything white. Eventually I’ll change this, but I really wanted a blank canvas to begin with.

We ran out of money to put in a kitchen, but I designed the rough layout so we could do all the wiring and plumbing ready for (hopefully) next year. My husband ripped out the lathe and plaster ceiling and we put in some sound-proof insullation as I like to play loud music while I’m cooking (the kids call it Mama’s kitchen disco!). For now, we’ve put in a temporary kitchen using basic units with a ply worktop! We certainly couldn’t live with a temporary bathroom and this took up the bulk of our time as we had to rip everything out and start from scratch – even the plumbing had to be redone!

Apart from the flooring, the last huge job was to install a gas line to the house. They had to close the main road for two days and dig a trench all the way up our front garden. The boiler, gas line, radiator and pipework took up the bulk of our budget but there was no workaround for this one. We did get in three quotes and we ended up going with the middle quote as they were really flexible on their start-date (our exchange date kept moving) and they were only slightly over the cheapest quote.

When it came to the flooring, we saved money by measuring and ordering the carpets ourselves and hiring a carpet-fitter directly. We chose cheap and cheerful carpet and vinyl flooring. Partly because this is what the budget allowed, but also partly as we didn’t want to be precious about the new flooring with three little ones in the house!

We also saved a lot of money by doing a lot of the works ourselves. My Father-in-Law has helped us massively with everything from wiring to plumbing and my Uncle did a lot of the painting and decorating. We got the professionals in to do what we couldn’t and got a tiler in to do the bathrooms purely to save us time! And in case you’re wondering – we did manage to stick to the schedule and moved in just before my husband started his new job!

Natalia xo