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  • House extension budget.
  • dantsw13
    Full Member

    We are extending our house this year, from:

    To:

    My budget is 80k

    Building work 50k
    New kitchen 20k(incl flooring, appliances, kitchen fitted by me)
    10k furniture + contingency.

    Is this realistic or should I scale back my expectations? There will be quite a bit of steel required as I’m taking out 2 structural walls.

    nickjb
    Free Member

    Gut reaction is that £80k is in the right area. Easy to spend more if the site is tricky, there is more structural work than first thought or you want Grand Designs windows and kitchen units. For a basic build on an easy site (also not in London) with a nice but standard kitchen you should be OK

    AlexSimon
    Full Member

    That one room (100sqm) is larger than my entire 3-(so-called)bed house!
    Approx 70sqm
    🙁

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    dantsw13
    Full Member

    I’m down in East Sussex, so sensible prices. I have a good mate who is a reputable/trustworthy/very good/reasonably priced builder – not expecting mates rates, but I trust him – to do most of the work.

    The kitchen budget is spot on – done a few and I’m confident with this part. This is my first big building project though.

    dantsw13
    Full Member

    Alex – the house I used to own in London is probably even smaller. I sold it 9 years ago, and it’s now worth 1.2 million 😯

    I seem to be in one of the last nice but stil affordable parts of the SE.

    mj27
    Free Member

    The spans on your steels are huge for residential, the cost of the supply of those is easy to find out. Hope you have worked out how to integrate (hide) them in the build or they will look ugly.

    Although the builder is a mate he still wants to make money so do things formally or you will spend more than you want and have one less friend in a few months time.

    Project creep is your enemy, make sure you and your wife agree on specifications and discuss your expectations.

    You should have a big tabbed spreadsheet for all parts of the build so most costs can be accounted for. There will be surprises but not many if you plan well.

    Check your dims, they differ in the 2 plans, might just be the diy drawings.

    Done 3 large home extensions here (and £2 to £40 million ones at work), prepare for the dust and mess, particularly if you are planning on still living in the house. And a wife who will get fed up with it.

    £80k might be ok but without a full bill of materials the cost of a door can be £350 or £2k, flooring £8/sq M or £60/sp M, your choice.

    Good luck

    woody2000
    Full Member

    Just as a side note – if you have any building work done, you will need to replace all your internal doors with fire doors to meet building regs. That can add up if there are a lot of them!

    We’ve just had a loft conversion/extension and the cost of the fire doors is £2K alone! We were not aware of this beforehand 🙁

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Loft conversions are different as you need to protect the stairway down to the ground floor as you are making a three story house and the window into the conversion will be too high to escape from hence the fire doors – not needed for the OP’s build.
    Building Regs are not usually retrospective.

    michaelbowden
    Full Member

    woody2000 – Member

    Just as a side note – if you have any building work done, you will need to replace all your internal doors with fire doors to meet building regs. That can add up if there are a lot of them!

    We’ve just had a loft conversion/extension and the cost of the fire doors is £2K alone! We were not aware of this beforehand

    Is that not because it has become a 3 floor building?? Rather than just having building work done.

    Edit – ^^ he got there first!

    woody2000
    Full Member

    Ah – thanks for the clarification 🙂

    As you were….

    wobbliscott
    Free Member

    The extension looks to be about 3.6m by about 10M if i’m reading the drawing correctly. The extension I had done last year was 3.6m by 8m. Build costs came in at £26k (bare build costs so plastered walls and labour to fit flooring, but not including flooring materials,and the installtion of the wet U/F heating, but not the actual boiler or CH elements).

    Total build costs by the time I furnashed it and put a new kitched and CH boiler in was around £50k.

    I didn’t have one big steel across the whole 8M span (wish I did now but would have caused plumbing issues and I guess alot of extra cost) so some cost saving there. I didn’t go over board on kitchen (£8k howdens and AO.com for equipment) and opted for laminate flooring (£400) instead of engineerd wood (£5k). CH/plumbing came in at £2k (new boiler, move location of boiler, conversion from vented storage system to unvented and U/F heating manifold), and I upgraded from 2 sets of French Doors to 2 sets of Bi-Folding doors.

    So at £80k you should have it well covered (obviously assuming things are stratight forward on foundations like mine were – you can sink alot of extra money here too). It depends on the fit and finish – that is where you can sink a whole load of cash if you’re not careful.

    I didn’t need to upgrade to internal fire doors.

    dantsw13
    Full Member

    Thanks everybody – some really good points to think on.

    MJ27 – I fully agree on the builder making money. I want him to do it as I trust him, not for cheap labour. The drawings are just my musings, certainly not accurate yet. We are going to get an architect – I just want to get my expectations in the right ballpark before I start. I will adjust my expectations to the budget, rather than throw money at it for the dream house. My minimum requirement is the removal of the interior connecting wall – anything else is the icing on top.

    Wobbliscott – thanks for the numbers – good to see details of a similar project.

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