Since singletrackworld is the only forum I frequent and a guide on how I live my life… I thought I’d continue on my first time buyer idiot questions and pose another one to the stw masses.

What jobs do you wish you did before you moved into your house? or equally what could you have done without that you thought was important?

On the top of my list is painting everything and getting the carpets professionally cleaned.. all services “work” but there is no washer / dryer but after that my list of todo’s goes a bit blank… any useful checks or services / messy jobs before I move in please do advise!?

Anything involving plumbing/electrics/plastering basically. If you want extra sockets, light fittings etc, or if you’re thinking of ripping out bathrooms and replacing, do it before you go in as it will take half the time and cause a tenth of the disruption.

Nah, just move in (unless it’s a completely uninhabitable shell). You’ll find out what you really need to do first by being there.

Our first house had a toilet that flushed hot water, **** knows how they managed that one…

Pretty obvious now but I should have just eaten backed beans on toast for a few months and just got the rewire done straight away – the mess it makes is unimaginable.

Do anything first which would prevent you living comfortably in the house whilst it was happening.

You’ll struggle to live in a house with a leaky roof or no heating or lead a comfortable existence without a kitchen or a bathroom for example.

If you plan on doing a load of interior work, do the hallway last as this will get high traffic / dirt / damage.

Make a list of the stuff that needs done and rank it in Pain in th Arse order and do the most inconvenient ones first.

If you plan on doing any rewiring/plumbing – do it first . boards up , cable chases etc.
If anything needs re-plastered do it before the carpets are cleaned.
Paint the cupboard under the stairs before it’s full of debris. 😀
Fit outside tap when you plumb in the washer.

edit – agree with the point about living in it for a bit to see what need done

Clear, clean board and insulate the loft if required.

Work from the top down, do any work required in the loft, then the bedrooms, then the recpetions/kitchen etc, that way you’re not making a mess of your freshly painted/cleaned rooms as you go.

If a builder has owned the house anytime in the previous 5 years assume any work they did was half arsed and be prepared to redo it.

Buy a house that doesn’t need work, ride bike. Seriously.

mini ramp in the garage

bouldering route up the stairs

CS 1.6 on the projector in the living room

Paint / Epoxy the garage floor, so much easier when not full of crap.

I wish I’d been a premiership footballer for a couple of years, or maybe head of an investment bank 🙁

Awesome advice so far keep it coming!

*Any raggling of cables or pipework into walls, makes a hell of a mess.
*Plastering, ditto.
*Anything under the floorboards that needs done.

You really don’t want to be asking me.

This graphic on your bedroom wall

This on your kitchen wall

Paint / Epoxy the garage floor, so much easier when not full of crap.

This.

+1 for sealing the garage floor with a quality epoxy paint, keeps dust down and looks great. Don’t do what I nearly did and paint yourself into a corner 😀

Very little. Live in it and see what it is like. While it is sensible to run in plumbing and electrics it’s just as easy to put them in the wrong place or change something that actually you can happily live with. Maybe build a workshop.

Having asbestos insulation board lining removed from the garage ceiling (by a proper company not diy). Knew about it when we moved in but advice was if solid and painted then perfectly safe to leave in place. However that means you can’t make any modifications, drill holes, change wiring etc which became a pain. Eventually had to empty a very full garage to have it stripped out.

What jobs do you wish you did before you moved into your house?

Took the Threashing Machine out…

haha yes! we had one of them on the farm – lovely bit of kit that has had it’s day … didn’t know what to do with it either!

Having seen how effective modern dry-lining is, I really wish we had dry-lined all the outside walls before moving in. We had to plaster over all the textured ceilings so it would have been no more messy and disruptive. Our heating bills since moving in would have been a tiny fraction of what they are. Will definitely dry-line the retirement home.

Think where your Christmas tree will go. Add socket nearby.

Outside tap

telephone/broadband cabling concealed under floors/skirting etc.

It depends if you have the luxury of being able to do the work whilst living elsewhere. We did, and the one thing I wish we’d done is take the horrible 60s dado rails off and replastered the lounge/dining room/stairs. It’s all one space so to do so now would he hugely disruptive.

Agree with plumbing and wiring though. We had a new boiler fitted before we moved in.

We’ve had a new kitchen, garage conversion and new bathroom since living in the house and my advice would be that as long as you have somewhere to escape the mess, you can do an awful lot whilst living at the house.

Anything structural you want to do.
Check there are as many electrical sockets as you want in every room and where they are in the room.
Put in mains powered fire alarm and any burglar alarm you want, just because that’s as bad for mess as rewiring.

I still have a dozen different shades of blue paint sampler across a living room wall from 15 years ago – in the end I decided it was too much hassle covering everything up in order to paint the room once I’d moved in (in reality it’s a weak excuse but I’m lazy so I’m sticking to it).

Sockets could be tricky as there is a hardwood floor thats staying down… I did notice walking around the other night that the floors on all levels are quite creaky… wondered if this was just because there wasn’t much in the house to dampen it?

I think I’ll paint everything as a minimum, epoxy floor sounds good for the garage but I’ll have to work out where I want a ground anchor or 2 first !

Keep them coming!

alexxx – Member

I think I’ll paint everything as a minimum, epoxy floor sounds good for the garage but I’ll have to work out where I want a ground anchor or 2 first !

Nah, just get it painted. You’ll always find little reasons to put off doing something later.
Just use some proper garage floor paint, get it painted & then put the ground anchors in later.
If you mess up a bit of the floor while doing them, you only have to repaint a small area.

I was going to paint the floor in my garage after moving in – we’ve been in 5 years Feb just gone & it’s still not done because the garage is chock full & it’s going to be a major ball ache.

You can ground anchor through the epoxy, it’s only tough paint. Either that or just fit/have fitted some lino. Lino might actually be better as it’ll absorb noise and stop dropped stuff from shattering.

If you can, do everything first. Even decorating becomes 10x harder when rooms need clearing. But as a minimum the electrical, plumbing and plastering. Including any channeling for TV/media stuff in the living room (running surround sound cables in skirting, HDMI and power socket in the wall for the TV etc.

As for sockets/flooring, do the floors last, it was so much easier once we’d accepted that the expensive parquet floor cold be trashed as much as necessary because the top couple of mm was going to be sanded off anyway.

Before you do anything else, research the area. Don’t buy the best house in a crap area, buy a less good house in a better area

Our first house had a toilet that flushed hot water, **** knows how they managed that one…

How did you realise that??

We did it all ar$e about t!t, decorated room, decided to get more sockets added, decorated hall first, decorated another room, decided to make an ensuite and knocked a hole in the wall.. etc etc. so I’m not the person to ask.

Didn’t have the luxury of doing anything before movin in so ahd a few weeks of showering in work or at the in-laws and cr@pping in a bucket. It wasnt that bad, character buiding as they say.

Before you do anything else, research the area. Don’t buy the best house in a crap area, buy a less good house in a better area

Depends what you want out of it, you spend more time in the house than the area so I’ve always lived in the house I wanted then found an area I could afford it in (usually a less popular one).

If you can, do everything first. Even decorating becomes 10x harder when rooms need clearing. But as a minimum the electrical, plumbing and plastering. Including any channeling for TV/media stuff in the living room (running surround sound cables in skirting, HDMI and power socket in the wall for the TV etc.

I’d disagree with that. Its impossible to know how you will use the house until you live in it. If you channel TV leads to one corner what happens when you realise 3 weeks later that the TV would be better in the opposite corner? Its pretty frustrating to have to hack a channel into fresh plaster or rip down the plaster board you put up a month ago to add some cabling you hadn’t thought about. I suppose if you have a lot of spare cash then you can do everything you might need in the future. Yes, it’ll be harder to do later but it will be right. You can work around DIY and if you plan carefully it needn’t be that disruptive. I’ve extended our house, moved the kitchen, added a downstairs loo and we’ve always had a working cooker, working plumbing, etc. Longest delay was a couple of days without a gas hob.

Paint the garage floor , work out where your beer fridge is going .

When you move out of the previous place, pack in order. Stuff we need now, stuff we need this quarter, stuff we might not need for a year. Then don’t unpack.

So when you finally work out what you want, after you’ve been in two months you’ll have only moved into part of the house properly.

Then you can do all the stuff already mentioned without having to almost completely move out.
We had three different master bedrooms and two living rooms in the first 6 months of living in this place. Some of them were even the same room. (one of them technically wasn’t a master bedroom, it was a room with a mattress on the floor and clothes piled up in the corner.)

Was all better than trying to pack stuff you haven’t actually used since unpacking back into a load of packing boxes you’ve just thrown away.

My last place (flat):

Sort out the damp properly

Rip out and replace the heating

Sort out the kitchen

Sort out the general decoration

Tank the coal bunker

Did none of that and lived in a building site for the time i had it. Tenants then lived in a lovely renovated flat for 2 years and now the new owners have a lovely sorted flat 🙄

We moved in 2.5 years ago. Since then I’ve put in a temporary kitchen (there wasn’t one) re wired, rerouted all pipes under the floor, they all went round the skirting boards, rebuilt the old dangerous leaking dormer, re roofed the whole house, pointed the back, (3 storeys) new bathroom, re plastered top two floors, painted, new skirts arch etc, fitted wood burner a and chimney liner. Got kitchen to do chimney stack to rebuild, another burner to fit, recording studio to build….wish I’d done it all before we moved in, it’s been an adventure

Knock down any old lath and plaster ceilings and do any re-wiring before you move in.