Yet Another House Renovation Thread
Discussion
Having completed on a new "project" house last week and having followed several similar threads on here with much interest and to get inspiration, and having already had a couple of PH'ers provide some input/guiance for our ideas, I thought I'd start another thread for a house renovation project.
So presenting - Lottie and Matt's new pad, just outside Milton Keynes:
4 bed detached with double garage. 1687 sq ft / 156.7sq m
Plan is to live in our current place for a month or so whilst we replace the central heating and rewire the new place. Looking to move in to new place around middle / end of August and rent out current place.
We have a gazzillion and one questions, and loads of pics to follow, so start your engines PH experts!
So presenting - Lottie and Matt's new pad, just outside Milton Keynes:
4 bed detached with double garage. 1687 sq ft / 156.7sq m
Plan is to live in our current place for a month or so whilst we replace the central heating and rewire the new place. Looking to move in to new place around middle / end of August and rent out current place.
We have a gazzillion and one questions, and loads of pics to follow, so start your engines PH experts!
Knocked up a couple of Visio floor plans
First things are to do central heating and a rewire.
Then looking to remove the two internal utility room walls in the kitchen to make a big kitchen.
Master bedroom - thinking about chopping this in half to make two rooms, and using the small fourth bedroom as an en suite for the master, so instead of a 4 bedroom house that is 3 doubles and a box room we have a 4 double bedroom with one double en suite house. Also thinking about chopping the bathroom in half to make an en suite for the 2nd biggest bedroom, but the bathroom window is large so dividing the room would mean changing the window which would affect the symmetry of the house at the rear.
Anyway, early days, just thought I'd kick off the thread now whilst we're high on excitement of completion and before the bills start rolling in
First things are to do central heating and a rewire.
Then looking to remove the two internal utility room walls in the kitchen to make a big kitchen.
Master bedroom - thinking about chopping this in half to make two rooms, and using the small fourth bedroom as an en suite for the master, so instead of a 4 bedroom house that is 3 doubles and a box room we have a 4 double bedroom with one double en suite house. Also thinking about chopping the bathroom in half to make an en suite for the 2nd biggest bedroom, but the bathroom window is large so dividing the room would mean changing the window which would affect the symmetry of the house at the rear.
Anyway, early days, just thought I'd kick off the thread now whilst we're high on excitement of completion and before the bills start rolling in
furtive said:
what if you expanded bed 4 into the cupboard in bed 1, using the rest of that space for an en-suite?
If we did that we'd lose the view out the back over the fields. It would also mean having to change quite a large window to privacy glass.Good idea about joining up the garage, although that side path his handy for getting kitchen rubbish to the bins and getting the bins out the front. Got any pics of your friends spiral staircase and above-garage room?
Radiator removed from kitchen. New boiler plumbed in. TRV's fitted to rads, and the hot and cold feeds and drainage that were stuck to the utility room wall now relocated out of the way ready for the walls to come down.
Next job is to do something about the comedy stairs.
This is the sort of look we're going for in the hall :
First quote in, for a straight white zig-zag design with handrail, post, spindles and steps in American Walnut - £7867.50. Plus VAT. And for an extra £400+VAT the company will even assemble them for me.
Needless to say, we're "shopping around".
Next job is to do something about the comedy stairs.
This is the sort of look we're going for in the hall :
First quote in, for a straight white zig-zag design with handrail, post, spindles and steps in American Walnut - £7867.50. Plus VAT. And for an extra £400+VAT the company will even assemble them for me.
Needless to say, we're "shopping around".
Planning out bedroom layouts with garden cane. 
Mate helping to demolish the old shed.
Old lean-to greenhouse and bushes ready to be destroyed so that bike shed and tool/wheelie bin shed can go up.
Bike shed built. I need to extend the existing patio to give a hard area infront of the shed but royally CBA at the moment.
Mate helping to demolish the old shed.
Old lean-to greenhouse and bushes ready to be destroyed so that bike shed and tool/wheelie bin shed can go up.
Bike shed built. I need to extend the existing patio to give a hard area infront of the shed but royally CBA at the moment.
Man cave / home office looking like it will be located in the current dining room. SWMBO is on about turning the garage loft space in to a massage room. Not sure how feasible that is, thinking about noise / fumes from garage.
campfreddie is coming over tonight (he's a structural engineer/architect) to go through all our ideas and give us a bit of advice.
As usual with these things, the ideas / ambitions far exceed the budget so this will be a slow one.
Most immediate things to address are knocking down the utility room walls, putting in new stairs and getting the rewire done. Tenants want to move in to our current house on 24th August so we need to crack on and get the new place livable in.
We have a quote in for sorting out the utility room walls and two quotes for stairs. The stairs are way more expensive than I thought they were going to be. The two problems seem to be the structure and the materials. Apparently if we have stringers on the stairs it will reduce the price by providing more strength/stability so they won't need to add so much "hidden" internal structure, and if we switch to oak treads rather than American Walnut it will reduce the price further as oak is cheaper. Just waiting to receive some samples.
campfreddie is coming over tonight (he's a structural engineer/architect) to go through all our ideas and give us a bit of advice.
As usual with these things, the ideas / ambitions far exceed the budget so this will be a slow one.
Most immediate things to address are knocking down the utility room walls, putting in new stairs and getting the rewire done. Tenants want to move in to our current house on 24th August so we need to crack on and get the new place livable in.
We have a quote in for sorting out the utility room walls and two quotes for stairs. The stairs are way more expensive than I thought they were going to be. The two problems seem to be the structure and the materials. Apparently if we have stringers on the stairs it will reduce the price by providing more strength/stability so they won't need to add so much "hidden" internal structure, and if we switch to oak treads rather than American Walnut it will reduce the price further as oak is cheaper. Just waiting to receive some samples.
louiebaby said:
I know everyone is different, but I quite like the idea of a utility room to leave the muddy boots in, or towel off the dogs, etc...
I don't disagree. But I'd rather have a bigger kitchen without an annoying wall cutting across the space. I spose we could look at possibly adding a utility by turning the outside path between kitchen and garage into a room as suggested above. One for the "way off in the future projects" list perhaps.Of course, this could all change once we've had a winter in the house and I get annoyed at muddy paw prints in the kitchen.
The expense with our stairs appears to come from our choice of materials and the design. I think DIY-shed staircases start at about 400 quid for a boggo straight run of 12 treads. You can pretty much spend as much or as little as you want on stairs as long as they comply with building regs (Part K IIRC).
Had Mat (campfreddie - architect/structural engineer/all round good egg) over tonight to get a few ideas for various things. He's given us a much better plan for the master bedroom / en suite than we had come up with plus a few different ideas for the kitchen.
Also talking about the stairs, he's suggested a cheaper solution might be to mount the treads in to the wall.
I also think we may switch to oak from American walnut because it is lighter in colour (as well as being cheaper - £60 cu ft instead of £100 cu ft and we need 17 cu ft for the treads) - the hall is very dark already.
Also talking about the stairs, he's suggested a cheaper solution might be to mount the treads in to the wall.
I also think we may switch to oak from American walnut because it is lighter in colour (as well as being cheaper - £60 cu ft instead of £100 cu ft and we need 17 cu ft for the treads) - the hall is very dark already.
Well it was an early start this morning, dropped the boss off at work for 6am then drove over to the house. The sheep were only just waking up when I got there. Lovely mist clearing upwards as the sun burnt it off. I love this time of the day. Very very quiet and still but its the kind of light that says "we're having summer today!".
My job was to finish getting carpets clear from upstairs ready for the electrician to start marking out sockets and cable runs and start the chasing. The bathroom lino was layed on hardboard. This was a bit of a struggle.
Landing carpet up, with the rest of the bedrooms. Floorboards look pretty good for a 1974 house.
Sparks arrives with his lad who broke up from school yesterday. We crack open the plans and they start going round room by room with big marker pens, marking sockets to put in, ones to remove and we have many many conversations about exactly what we want. I must be the worlds worst client. I really wish we'd had the house for a month and could have sat and taken all the measurements and planned things out in more detail. Things are a little "off the cuff" which is not my normal MO plus its not the way to work with trades. Luckily Pete the Sparks humours us and makes us think about things we had not considered plus responds to our changes of plans in a pragmatic kind of way so I'm sure we'll be fine :-)
Pete gets a faceplate off in the hall as a sample and has a chuckle. There are wires coming in to and out of the back box that bear no relation to any circuit or sockets in the locality. Given that the place is not occupied and leccy doesn't matter, we agree to turn the leccy off and let the rewire happen like that (he did want to try and keep some leccy on but clearly thats not feasible).
But - how will he power his cutter and the hoover if he turns the leccy off?
Answer: bit of a hack and an RCD :-)
Spur out the back of the fuse board, via an RCD socket, plug the extension reel in to it, jobs a goodun.
![](http://thumbsnap.com/sc/kvNBtDwx.jpg[/img]</a> <a href="http://thumbsnap.com/kvNBtDwx" Target="_blank">[img]http://thumbsnap.com/sc/kvNBtDwx.jpg)
Lunch break o clock. Pete and Ben had their sarnies. I collected Lottie from work and went and bought a lawn mower. Well lets face it, our little electric jobbie will not cut the mustard. We have never had this much grass to mow before! Being PH, the mower needs an engine, obviously. Back garden is a shade under 230 sq m and can't really justify a sit on (its not that big) so after an hour or so in the lawn mower shop in Northampton we are now the proud owners of our first petrol mower (its like a PH rite of passage isnt it?)
Getting back to the house, we are met by two ghost-like figures on the drive, dust masks dangling taking on liquids. It's Pete and Ben looking like a whole bottle of talc has been emptied over them. The reason soon becomes clear!
I'd like to show you a picture of the dining room but it was too cloudy to actually get a good pic of it!
So, not bad progress for the first day of the rewire. We probably have two more days of chasing out then we can let the dust settle.
And then maybe we can double check all the holes in the walls are where we need them to be
My job was to finish getting carpets clear from upstairs ready for the electrician to start marking out sockets and cable runs and start the chasing. The bathroom lino was layed on hardboard. This was a bit of a struggle.
Landing carpet up, with the rest of the bedrooms. Floorboards look pretty good for a 1974 house.
Sparks arrives with his lad who broke up from school yesterday. We crack open the plans and they start going round room by room with big marker pens, marking sockets to put in, ones to remove and we have many many conversations about exactly what we want. I must be the worlds worst client. I really wish we'd had the house for a month and could have sat and taken all the measurements and planned things out in more detail. Things are a little "off the cuff" which is not my normal MO plus its not the way to work with trades. Luckily Pete the Sparks humours us and makes us think about things we had not considered plus responds to our changes of plans in a pragmatic kind of way so I'm sure we'll be fine :-)
Pete gets a faceplate off in the hall as a sample and has a chuckle. There are wires coming in to and out of the back box that bear no relation to any circuit or sockets in the locality. Given that the place is not occupied and leccy doesn't matter, we agree to turn the leccy off and let the rewire happen like that (he did want to try and keep some leccy on but clearly thats not feasible).
But - how will he power his cutter and the hoover if he turns the leccy off?
Answer: bit of a hack and an RCD :-)
Spur out the back of the fuse board, via an RCD socket, plug the extension reel in to it, jobs a goodun.
Lunch break o clock. Pete and Ben had their sarnies. I collected Lottie from work and went and bought a lawn mower. Well lets face it, our little electric jobbie will not cut the mustard. We have never had this much grass to mow before! Being PH, the mower needs an engine, obviously. Back garden is a shade under 230 sq m and can't really justify a sit on (its not that big) so after an hour or so in the lawn mower shop in Northampton we are now the proud owners of our first petrol mower (its like a PH rite of passage isnt it?)
Getting back to the house, we are met by two ghost-like figures on the drive, dust masks dangling taking on liquids. It's Pete and Ben looking like a whole bottle of talc has been emptied over them. The reason soon becomes clear!
I'd like to show you a picture of the dining room but it was too cloudy to actually get a good pic of it!
So, not bad progress for the first day of the rewire. We probably have two more days of chasing out then we can let the dust settle.
And then maybe we can double check all the holes in the walls are where we need them to be
Alfachick said:
Chisel and hammers of varying sizes.
No power-tool content 
The SDS drill shall be meeting the fireplace on Saturday. What could possibly go wrong?
Good tip about the flu liner. Thanks. We're going to go to a fireplace shop near Towcester this weekend for a browse and to get some ideas.
Popped over to the house earlier. Impatience got the better of me regarding the fireplace, so I attacked it with a hammer and chisel.
Pete the sparky is making good progress chasing out all the sockets, but some of the walls are co-operating a bit too much. I think it's fair to say we are going to need a lot of plastering done afterwards
Toxic Nerve and VEX have been very helpful with input to the whole house video / audio distribution. I should be finalising the schematic this weekend. Satellite dish arrives tomorrow. Builders arrive Monday to take the utility room walls down.
Busy busy busy!
Pete the sparky is making good progress chasing out all the sockets, but some of the walls are co-operating a bit too much. I think it's fair to say we are going to need a lot of plastering done afterwards
Toxic Nerve and VEX have been very helpful with input to the whole house video / audio distribution. I should be finalising the schematic this weekend. Satellite dish arrives tomorrow. Builders arrive Monday to take the utility room walls down.
Busy busy busy!
Busy weekend.
Pete the electrician has been making good progress. Almost all of the chasing out is done (I just need to finalise the positions of speaker and network sockets for the AV stuff but leccy stuff is done). He's also ripping out the old wiring where he can.
Lottie has made great progress in the garden. Front and rear lawns mowed with the new mower, and the front beds stripped and emptied. There were some mahoosive rocks in there, took two of us to move them!
It looks like we have an ex-vegetable patch in the back garden. We want to make it the same as all the other grass. Can we just rotavate it?
Muggins here decided there was not enough mess being made, so decreed that all the wallpaper and woodchip must come off. I learned two things today :
1. Wallpaper stripping takes a lot longer than you imagine.
2. Putting woodchip on ceilings must be made illegal.
It's taken me a day and a half to strip the dining room, which is going to become my new office (you can tell by the chasing for the power sockets )
This was just hideous textured wallpaper and it took me that long. The kitchen has woodchip over the walls and the ceiling. Sod that, I'd rather rip the ceiling down and put a new one up.
Campfreddy popped over to check the joists and utility room walls to confirm they are not structural. Builders arrive tomorrow to knock them down
Tenants have asked to move in to our current house on 24th so we need to be moved in by 19th. August is going to be busy!
Pete the electrician has been making good progress. Almost all of the chasing out is done (I just need to finalise the positions of speaker and network sockets for the AV stuff but leccy stuff is done). He's also ripping out the old wiring where he can.
Lottie has made great progress in the garden. Front and rear lawns mowed with the new mower, and the front beds stripped and emptied. There were some mahoosive rocks in there, took two of us to move them!
It looks like we have an ex-vegetable patch in the back garden. We want to make it the same as all the other grass. Can we just rotavate it?
Muggins here decided there was not enough mess being made, so decreed that all the wallpaper and woodchip must come off. I learned two things today :
1. Wallpaper stripping takes a lot longer than you imagine.
2. Putting woodchip on ceilings must be made illegal.
It's taken me a day and a half to strip the dining room, which is going to become my new office (you can tell by the chasing for the power sockets
)This was just hideous textured wallpaper and it took me that long. The kitchen has woodchip over the walls and the ceiling. Sod that, I'd rather rip the ceiling down and put a new one up.
Campfreddy popped over to check the joists and utility room walls to confirm they are not structural. Builders arrive tomorrow to knock them down
Tenants have asked to move in to our current house on 24th so we need to be moved in by 19th. August is going to be busy!
Productive day today.
The wood samples for the stairs arrived. Americal Walnut and Oak. We are going to go oak - the American Walnut will be just too dark for the hallway. The oak sample is the thickness that the stair treads will be. Should look fab with white risers, white bannister and oak handrail. We're going to replace the parquet floor with oak flooring and have oak fire-door type doors downstairs to continue the theme, with white walls. (we think - need to mock this up and see how it looks).
The main job of the morning was to demolish the utility room. It's robbing far too much space from the kitchen.
The guys didn't hang about. First wall came down pretty quickly.
Second wall not long behind.
At this point I mentioned what a ball ache it was going to be to strip the woodchip from the ceiling. We very quickly decided as we had not made enough mess, to rip the ceiling down too.
![](http://thumbsnap.com/sc/Rn7aRGDm.jpg[/img]</a> <a href="http://thumbsnap.com/Rn7aRGDm" Target="_blank">[img]http://thumbsnap.com/sc/Rn7aRGDm.jpg)
Utility room. Gone. Ceiling. Gone.
We now have a nice 5m x 4m space to put a nice kitchen in to.
The wood samples for the stairs arrived. Americal Walnut and Oak. We are going to go oak - the American Walnut will be just too dark for the hallway. The oak sample is the thickness that the stair treads will be. Should look fab with white risers, white bannister and oak handrail. We're going to replace the parquet floor with oak flooring and have oak fire-door type doors downstairs to continue the theme, with white walls. (we think - need to mock this up and see how it looks).
The main job of the morning was to demolish the utility room. It's robbing far too much space from the kitchen.
The guys didn't hang about. First wall came down pretty quickly.
Second wall not long behind.
At this point I mentioned what a ball ache it was going to be to strip the woodchip from the ceiling. We very quickly decided as we had not made enough mess, to rip the ceiling down too.
Utility room. Gone. Ceiling. Gone.
We now have a nice 5m x 4m space to put a nice kitchen in to.
Mark Benson said:
mattdaniels said:
It looks like we have an ex-vegetable patch in the back garden. We want to make it the same as all the other grass. Can we just rotavate it?
Best thing to do is to cover it in weedkiller (glycophosphate), leave it a while, do it again, leave, then in September or April, rotavate or dig over, rake and seed with grass seed or turf it over.If you don't kill off what's there you'll end up with a lawn with random weeds/plants popping up in the middle of it. It's worth the hassle of the weedkiller, I can tell you from experience
Bit of a discovery today.
Ripped up the carpet in the dining room in preparation for channelling out the concrete floor to move a radiator, to discover the concrete floor is in fact a parquet floor, same as what is laid in the hall.
Now, I hate it. But I know there is parquet and there is parquet. So before I rip it all up and throw it in the skip / on a bonfire, is it worth anything?
Dodgy camera phone pic here of the blocks:
They are a good 5-6mm in depth and the room is 4.5m x 3.2m (3.7m in to the bay).
Also given the price of scrap metal, I assume these rads are worth something to someone?
Ripped up the carpet in the dining room in preparation for channelling out the concrete floor to move a radiator, to discover the concrete floor is in fact a parquet floor, same as what is laid in the hall.
Now, I hate it. But I know there is parquet and there is parquet. So before I rip it all up and throw it in the skip / on a bonfire, is it worth anything?
Dodgy camera phone pic here of the blocks:
They are a good 5-6mm in depth and the room is 4.5m x 3.2m (3.7m in to the bay).
Also given the price of scrap metal, I assume these rads are worth something to someone?
Gassing Station | Homes, Gardens and DIY | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff