Refurbishing Old House

Peppery

Hi, I'm looking at buying a house in Dublin that's in a complete state! Would love some very general figures for making it liveable in the short-term.

I think to make it liveable it will need at least:

Total rewiring €10,000
Install central heating €15,000
Pull down wallpaper with possible replastering €2,000
Install bathroom €8,000
Massive clean/pull up carpets €1,000

Could anyone help with figures. I've done some research and come up with these figures but could be well off!

Edit: It's a large terraced house, 3 bed, from early 1900s. Hasn't been touched since the 70s I'd say.

Thank you for any help.

jlm29

If you’ve a total rewire, you’ll probably be looking at re plastering everywhere too, so you would need to factor that in.
You could consider insulation too while you’re about it, but I don’t know what any of that would cost in Dublin, sorry!

ampleforth

Peppery wrote: »

Hi, I'm looking at buying a house in Dublin that's in a complete state! Would love some very general figures for making it liveable in the short-term.

I think to make it liveable it will need at least:

Total rewiring €10,000
Install central heating €15,000
Pull down wallpaper with possible replastering €2,000
Install bathroom €8,000
Massive clean/pull up carpets €1,000

Could anyone help with figures. I've done some research and come up with these figures but could be well off!

Edit: It's a large terraced house, 3 bed, from early 1900s. Hasn't been touched since the 70s I'd say.

Thank you for any help.

You did not mentioned anything about the size of the house...

Peppery

Well it's a large 3 bed terraced, standard for Dublin. Exact size is 95m2. But I'm just looking for a general idea of costs!

ampleforth

Peppery wrote: »

Well it's a large 3 bed terraced, standard for Dublin. Exact size is 95m2. But I'm just looking for a general idea of costs!

10k for rewiring sounds alright. With a bit of good wise selection and not too crazy a specification you might get lower. Masonry bare walls require a lot more work than timber-framed isolated walls. If you do not include a lot of extra wiring (e.g. LAN cables, speaker cables etc), then 10k should get you there.

JustAThought

'Massive clean/pull up carpets' - this seems a biy low considering the monopoly on skip hire prices in the city. Does this include labour for massive clean and also the labour,materials and possible cealing scaffold hire for old high cealings painting and that of of walls /skirting boards/cealings . Old Walls may need skimming also if you're not replacing the ancient wallpaper - price for this might be worthwhile factoring in.

We.renovated an old 19th terraced bilding as part of an office refurb and what was going on IN and under the walls and floors was frightening. Walls were crumbling and made of loam and shell mix (yes!) And the underfloor piping for sewage (no basic rat flap filters either) left a lot to ge done...especially as we couldnt figure wjat was going on until we had cctv put down the drains and took the floors up. I hope you have a contingency!

Also - windows /insulation.?

ampleforth

Would advice the OP to also look at Skip Bags (instead of skips) for high volume and low (up to 1.5t) weight. Cost is between 65 and 130 Euro per skip. Especially when you throw out large amounts of wires, carpet etc (stuff that is generally light).

And JustAThought is obviously right: Plan in 500-800 Euro for garbage!

GreeBo

Is it timber floors upstairs and down?
It will be cheaper to just reboard all the walls than fart around with wallpaper.

tbh, if it was me (and it kinda is at the moment) and you are not living there yet...

I would gut the house myself, all carpets and plasterboard taken down and dumped into skips and then get the quotes from the various trades or ideally a single builder/contractor.

They will all work much faster if they dont have to worry about opening up walls and lifting carpets and it will be cheaper if they are not fixing floors and walls as they go.

Then they can just board and skim all the rooms and do 2nd fix electrics/fit rads etc.

NB, this assume you are not trying to keep any of the existing features/ceilings/coving etc?


Also you dont have a quote for a kitchen? That is an expensive part of a house to redo.

GreeBo

ampleforth wrote: »

Would advice the OP to also look at Skip Bags (instead of skips) for high volume and low (up to 1.5t) weight. Cost is between 65 and 130 Euro per skip. Especially when you throw out large amounts of wires, carpet etc (stuff that is generally light).

And JustAThought is obviously right: Plan in 500-800 Euro for garbage!

You will need a lot of skip bags if you are gutting the innards of a house!

ampleforth

GreeBo wrote: »

You will need a lot of skip bags if you are gutting the innards of a house!

True. But judging from the original post, I did not think that OP will go that far --- sounded a bit more subtle to me. Myself had masonry walls when I did that, so I had a lot less of that. Obviously it all depends.

If the job is big and done in one go, then metal skips are the way to go... also depends on the size of the front garden...

Peppery

Thanks for the replies. I definitely hadn’t thought about costs of skips and hasn’t given too much thought to how to strip walls.

I suppose I’m at the stage of trying to work our if we can afford to take the project on at all. I didn’t factor in kitchen because there’s a workable one and I figure that’ll come down the line. I’m trying to work out how much it’ll cost to make it liveable for a couple of years before we can save wnough to actually make it nice. It doesn’t have a bathroom so I factored that in as a necessity. To be honest it doesn’t have much in the way of original features so don’t have to worry about saving any.

GreeBo

Peppery wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. I definitely hadn’t thought about costs of skips and hasn’t given too much thought to how to strip walls.

I suppose I’m at the stage of trying to work our if we can afford to take the project on at all. I didn’t factor in kitchen because there’s a workable one and I figure that’ll come down the line. I’m trying to work out how much it’ll cost to make it liveable for a couple of years before we can save wnough to actually make it nice. It doesn’t have a bathroom so I factored that in as a necessity. To be honest it doesn’t have much in the way of original features so don’t have to worry about saving any.

just be aware that replumbing and rewiring dont play well with tiled areas, so if much of your kitchen is tiled then it might not be too workable afterwards...


The "nice" thing about just rebaording/skimming is that you can do a lot of the prep yourself.
You are just ripping down plasterboard which both saves you money on paying someone else to do it, but also makes the wiring and plumbing easier/faster and so cheaper.
On top of that its faster and cheaper if the plasterer is just boarding and skimming the whole place rather than filling and skimming little areas of chased walls. Will be a better finish too.

ampleforth

Try to look for somebody who is good in doing many kinds of jobs so that you don't have to deal with multiple companies at your site (which is a lot more complicated than talking to one foreman).

mikeymouse

Irish Times did a breakdown of costs for renovation.
It gives a rough idea of the breakdown.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/interiors/anatomy-of-a-refurb-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-100-000-1.3978652