Cost of balcony refurbishment
Discussion
Hello, bought our dream house 2.5 years ago and very happy here. It has a long balcony at the back - about 11m long and 1-3m wide. The glass panes have been built off supporting wooden beams which have slowly rotated so that it is now bowing out quite some way. It will be dangerous soon (if not already) and needs a total refurb.
We just had a quote from a specialist company to strip it down and effectively completely rebuild. Steel frame, supporting posts and piling. Millboard composite material so should be maintenance free. Waterproofed underneath. Lighting, drainage. New staircase at one end. A high end job and what they are describing sounds fantastic.
However, their quote took my breath away. It was over £45K. When they also priced in replacing the decking below (about 14m x 3m on average) it came to about £75K.
I'm happy to invest in the house, but this sort of expense for a balcony sounds crazy to me. I figured you should be able to do a couple of kitchen extensions for that!
Am I totally out of touch with prices or is this realistic? I'd appreciate any insights from people that know about this kind of thing.
We just had a quote from a specialist company to strip it down and effectively completely rebuild. Steel frame, supporting posts and piling. Millboard composite material so should be maintenance free. Waterproofed underneath. Lighting, drainage. New staircase at one end. A high end job and what they are describing sounds fantastic.
However, their quote took my breath away. It was over £45K. When they also priced in replacing the decking below (about 14m x 3m on average) it came to about £75K.
I'm happy to invest in the house, but this sort of expense for a balcony sounds crazy to me. I figured you should be able to do a couple of kitchen extensions for that!
Am I totally out of touch with prices or is this realistic? I'd appreciate any insights from people that know about this kind of thing.
Exystenshalist said:
Hello, bought our dream house 2.5 years ago and very happy here. It has a long balcony at the back - about 11m long and 1-3m wide. The glass panes have been built off supporting wooden beams which have slowly rotated so that it is now bowing out quite some way. It will be dangerous soon (if not already) and needs a total refurb.
We just had a quote from a specialist company to strip it down and effectively completely rebuild. Steel frame, supporting posts and piling. Millboard composite material so should be maintenance free. Waterproofed underneath. Lighting, drainage. New staircase at one end. A high end job and what they are describing sounds fantastic.
However, their quote took my breath away. It was over £45K. When they also priced in replacing the decking below (about 14m x 3m on average) it came to about £75K.
I'm happy to invest in the house, but this sort of expense for a balcony sounds crazy to me. I figured you should be able to do a couple of kitchen extensions for that!
Am I totally out of touch with prices or is this realistic? I'd appreciate any insights from people that know about this kind of thing.
Do you have any photos?We just had a quote from a specialist company to strip it down and effectively completely rebuild. Steel frame, supporting posts and piling. Millboard composite material so should be maintenance free. Waterproofed underneath. Lighting, drainage. New staircase at one end. A high end job and what they are describing sounds fantastic.
However, their quote took my breath away. It was over £45K. When they also priced in replacing the decking below (about 14m x 3m on average) it came to about £75K.
I'm happy to invest in the house, but this sort of expense for a balcony sounds crazy to me. I figured you should be able to do a couple of kitchen extensions for that!
Am I totally out of touch with prices or is this realistic? I'd appreciate any insights from people that know about this kind of thing.
Might just be me but can't envisage the current construction from your description.
Decent welding company (steel beams, structural stuff) to build a fag packet designed frame which could be galvanised. You could be required to engage a structural engineer as I’d guess it’ll come under building regs.
We have a steel framed conservatory built like this with big steels as a portal type frame, a std conservatory ally framed glass roof kit plus shop front glazing and a big patio sliding door with powder coated custom folded ally cladding bits where needed. Way cheaper than going to a posh conservatory company - from memory we did it for about a third of ‘proper’ designs.
F H Brundle will do all the railings and bits you’d need to add to the frame apart from the actual decking.
We have a steel framed conservatory built like this with big steels as a portal type frame, a std conservatory ally framed glass roof kit plus shop front glazing and a big patio sliding door with powder coated custom folded ally cladding bits where needed. Way cheaper than going to a posh conservatory company - from memory we did it for about a third of ‘proper’ designs.
F H Brundle will do all the railings and bits you’d need to add to the frame apart from the actual decking.
I was idly pricing up jobs for a 'house of interest' a while back and found these people:
https://diometonline.co.uk/walk-out-balconies/infi...
Indicating about £10k for a 5m long balcony.
As an engineer who isn't a builder, I'd guess that it gets complex and expensive when the balcony structure is integrated into the house structure and it all needs re-working?
I didn't look much further into it, because the house was a no-go for other reasons.
You could probably do it cheaper if you found the fight engineer to do the calcs and a fabricator to do the steel stuff and a general builder to assemble and finish.
Or a warehouse mezzanine and generic balustrades from ebay.
https://diometonline.co.uk/walk-out-balconies/infi...
Indicating about £10k for a 5m long balcony.
As an engineer who isn't a builder, I'd guess that it gets complex and expensive when the balcony structure is integrated into the house structure and it all needs re-working?
I didn't look much further into it, because the house was a no-go for other reasons.
You could probably do it cheaper if you found the fight engineer to do the calcs and a fabricator to do the steel stuff and a general builder to assemble and finish.
Or a warehouse mezzanine and generic balustrades from ebay.
Cow Corner said:
if you think £45k will buy you two kitchen extensions, you might want to jump in your Delorean and join us in 2025 
Yup, any serious building/engineering work looks staggeringly expensive these days. We asked an architect to design a £250k refurb project and when it was put out to tender the quotations came in >£450k, so that was the end of that. Exystenshalist said:
Hello, bought our dream house 2.5 years ago and very happy here. It has a long balcony at the back - about 11m long and 1-3m wide. The glass panes have been built off supporting wooden beams which have slowly rotated so that it is now bowing out quite some way. It will be dangerous soon (if not already) and needs a total refurb..
What does this actually mean? Do you have more photos? It sounds a bit catastrophic when the picture shows what looks like a perfectly fine balcony with a slightly wobbly balustrade. If nothing else a sound balcony hasn't become unsafe in 2 and a half years unless the surveyor truly phoned it in.Pricing in quote is ex VAT.
Thanks @OutInTheShed for the recommendation. They are in Sheffield and I am just northwest of London but I'll give them a call on Monday - nothing to lose.
@andy43 - I think this is definitely worth considering. I'm talking to the structural engineer who project managed our build pre Covid and hopefully they can come up with a more affordable, yet still high quality, option.
@Cow Corner - I may well be out of touch as the last project we did was a complete house build before Brexit. However, I was thinking that £75K would cover two extensions, albeit that may still be out of touch.
When I think about it the cost of adding the ground level decking is about £26K including VAT. I'm not sure on exact square metre size but that can't be far off £500 / sq. metre. That seems nuts to me?
Thanks @OutInTheShed for the recommendation. They are in Sheffield and I am just northwest of London but I'll give them a call on Monday - nothing to lose.
@andy43 - I think this is definitely worth considering. I'm talking to the structural engineer who project managed our build pre Covid and hopefully they can come up with a more affordable, yet still high quality, option.
@Cow Corner - I may well be out of touch as the last project we did was a complete house build before Brexit. However, I was thinking that £75K would cover two extensions, albeit that may still be out of touch.
When I think about it the cost of adding the ground level decking is about £26K including VAT. I'm not sure on exact square metre size but that can't be far off £500 / sq. metre. That seems nuts to me?
hidetheelephants said:
What does this actually mean? Do you have more photos? It sounds a bit catastrophic when the picture shows what looks like a perfectly fine balcony with a slightly wobbly balustrade. If nothing else a sound balcony hasn't become unsafe in 2 and a half years unless the surveyor truly phoned it in.
---Hope I'm getting the quote function right!
The glass panels were already leaning out when we bought the house and we picked this up as something we would need to pay to rectify. But I had no idea how much it might be! The current balcony structure doesn't seem to have any steel in it - all wood. This wood is rotting. Quite a bit of the decking has warped. So I'd like a complete refurb, ideally with a maintenance free solution.
No problem to add a few pictures if needed. Anything in particular that would be helpful?
I m wondering if that s saveable? Lower deck removed for access, prop the balcony with a bit of extra winding to get it just above level, decent foundations to replace the cheese they used, new posts and maybe a bit of extra steel to tie it all in? Or is it rotten?
ETA and tie it to the chimney stack at the far end sort of like the pic below - under the render is a stainless strap about two feet long running back along the wall to hold the glass vertical.
ETA and tie it to the chimney stack at the far end sort of like the pic below - under the render is a stainless strap about two feet long running back along the wall to hold the glass vertical.
Edited by andy43 on Saturday 2nd August 12:03
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