1 YEAR (in 30 minutes) RENOVATING an OLD LONDON VICTORIAN TERRACED HOUSE into DREAM HOME

after a number of years of renting various different flats and houses the hunt began to find a property that was actually a fair price after a year of looking I found this a very typical London Victorian Terrace House however the one big difference with this Terrace House to a normal Terrace House in London is it's actually 2 m wider than most normal terorist houses because as you can see it sticks out to the left a little bit more than a normal house now this added space actually allowed the staircase and the hallway to fit just on the side therefore meaning that it's actually got really big living rooms and bedrooms so as I walked in I was actually super impressed with how big the rooms were with 3 m High ceilings which is not at all what I was expecting now this house was on the market for £1.1 million for a three bedroom one shower room Zero kitchen with a horrific Conservatory it was dated there was some nice original features but a lot of it was just crap 1.1 million for that are you dumb it didn't make any sense but it kind of did because the nearby sold prices were in the 1.3 to 1.4 million pound area for a nice done up for bedroom two bath Terrace House the ones that were more expensive had an extra bedroom how did they get that extra bedroom by adding a loft conversion they were using that existing footprint of the Terrace house but adding an extra bedroom and in most cases an extra bathroom in that Loft space so that kind of explains the price difference but the estate agents failed to realize that this is London Renovations are extremely expensive just paying the council for the permits to get rid of waste and get skips on the road you're looking at 3 400 quid per Skip and say you have 20 of them that's just in waste removal alone so their price of 1.1 million wasn't actually that accurate the fair true value of it was around the million P Mark so that's why I offered 920,000 on it £180,000 under the asking price that the estate agent was telling me the owner would not move from that price and at first the estate agent was telling the truth the home owner told me where I could go but the thing is I've bought and sold a load of things and the thing that always happens to me is when someone low balls and offers a stupid low price for something my immediate thought process is to tell that person to f off but there is 5% of me that goes oh maybe this isn't worth what I thought it was and so I just let my offer sit now at this time the estate agent called me back being like you're going to increase your offer I've got another person who's very interested in the house which have you ever actually heard an estate agent say that nobody else is interested in a house has that ever happened now after 2 days passed I decided to increase my offer to 930,000 to which the estate agent said come on that's not even really a big jump up in price it's going to insult my client I'm not going to put forward that offer and I said well you legally have to do it mush so do it and the estate engine goes ah yeah good point so he did it and the seller came back saying let's me in the middle a million quids so he had dropped it by 100 Grand now I've always had the Viewpoint with haggling where if you don't ask you don't get so I tried it a little bit more only went up 20 grand and we ended up settling on 900 77,500 quid now for some reason I don't understand but people don't explain mortgages or how much money they're putting down as a deposit when you watch any of these videos and I've always wished they would because I find it really interesting so that $977,500 house what does that actually look like in terms of how much money I was having to put into it it was around this time that I found out that you could actually get four people on a mortgage if you wanted to you just just got to call up a mortgage broker and tell them what you want so my brother asked his girlfriend if she would like to buy a third of this house so what does that mean well that means that it's a triple mortgage now meaning that the mortgage repayments and interest can get divided by three the deposit gets divided by three the renovation cost gets divided by three how much of a deposit did we put down well because there's a ton of renovation work we didn't want to put down a very large deposit so we ended up putting down 9% so 30 grand each and that mortgage amount was 900 quid each so 2,700 in total which is a lot of money however it's not because my brother and me were paying three and a half Grand a month in rent in clapa mtown so for me I was pretty happy with that because now my mortgage on a million pound house is significantly less than was renting so now let's get into the Super interesting stuff so step one was move out of the Terrace house that I was renting now as you can see it was very nice it was super modern and it was nice leaving a day job that I hated and then getting back here and you go oh actually this is all right this is a really nice place and then the job is paying for this and then I'm living in a nice part of London it was good but like I said the amount of money that I was spending on this place it started to upset me packed up the house and it was moving time to the new house which I was very excited about it's always being a dream of mine to buy a house in London and if you haven't watched any of my other videos my background is well I used to be a laborer then I wanted a lot more from life so then I got into Finance in London realized that working in an office is the worst thing ever so I spent every single waking moment outside of that day job creating side hustles and businesses to just get out of it which unbelievably I am now sat at my new tiny house project fully self-employed and I have left that day job that I hated so much now when it comes to renovating a house something something on this scale looks like a nightmare but it's actually very simple if you break it down okay maybe it's not very simple but it is really essentially it all gets broken down into three steps one figure out what you want to do to the house you need planning permission planning permission usually requires an architect but you can do it yourself so we decided we would save some money and draw all of the plans ourselves so instead of spending six grand on an architect we just drew all of the plans ourselves on SketchUp and in total getting planning permission for this house cost 350 quid now on that let's chat about the floor plan as you can see this is what the floor plan currently looks like it's pretty much if you were to design the perfect floor plan that would put off most buyers this is it because this is a family home where typically I mean on average most people have two kids you're going to need three bedrooms but then to share one shower room isn't very ideal and then also as I said it didn't have a kitchen yes obviously you can see in the photo it did but that is an oven next to a sink it doesn't really count as a kitchen and anyone viewing this house pretty much just turned away immediately because instantly you've got a chunk of cash that you're going to need to spend making this place properly habitable and on that there's something that's worth mentioning is this house is in a very Posh area and from my personal experience with Posh people in London they don't like getting their hands dirty so in order for them to do this renovation they would be renting another house whilst this renovation Works was going on now I don't have that kind of money so I was living in this renovation project the entire time which was disgusting I am not going to glamorize this at all this renovation project was the most inhumane renovation project I have ever done it was awful and you're going to see why as this renovation progresses so what did we end up going for planning permission for well it was pretty much everything as I said this is my house that I was replacing the Terrace house that I was renting but there is also the element that buying a house and buying the right house and doing the right works is your one opportunity in life to increase your Equity by a mega amount if you buy right a few times in your life you're set trust me go watch some of my recent videos and read between the lines of what I'm saying you will see how it can really set your life up if you're one of these people go oh you should just be buying your dream home it shouldn't be an investment well you go do that but I'm not in a position where I can afford to just Chuck money at buying a dream house and then deal with the consequences of the market Falls 10% I can't do that so you are probably going to witness now the cheapest but most luxurious house renovation that will ever hit that area in London because we end up doing 95% of the renovation our ourselves now what was the plan for this renovation it was to add a massive side return extension go up into the Loft add a bedroom and on Suite in the main Loft and then add a thing called a pod extension now for those of you in England London there is a trick to this you need to do the planning permission first for the Loft conversion and then use permitted development for the Pod extension otherwise they won't allow you to do this so that is get planning permission first for the main Loft once you get permission on that use permitted development for the Pod and that is how I ended up creating the largest house on this road going from 130 sare M to 205 squ M and in an area in London where the price per square meter is the price of a nice car every single meter counts I've been asked quite a few times is a renovation difficult to do well nothing is hard to do when you know how but the one thing I can tell you is a renovation is more difficult than a new build and the reason for this is any mistakes that occur on a new build it's all your fault whereas if you're renovating you're having to move around an existing structure that you did not build and also I will never renovate another Terrace House in my life I hate them I love them but I hate them because you've got no space look at the size of this Garden there is so much waste that is created when renovating a house and you need an area to put it and then also in order to be really efficient you need to order all of your materials and store them on site so they're in line for any works that you have going on on that note what works did we have going on because as I said we did 95% of this renovation ourselves and that wasn't the original plan originally we really wanted to employ some people so when we're at our day jobs we could have Builders working on the house whilst we're at work wouldn't that have been brilliant however as I said with London Renovations being so expensive there was not a single quote out of the 20 that we got that just for the side return extension was less than 85 Grand and the guy who said 85 Grand was an utter puppet the rest of these quotes were 190 200 the most we got was 540,000 for the kitchen extension are you dumb 540,000 and unbelievably there are people in London who will actually pay this and fair play to the builders that I know who do this one of my friends just did a Loft conversion in Chelsea and charged 350,000 but the actual material cost and labor for everything was for that project around 80 grand so yeah it's unbelievable but I can't do that it would make me feel physically sick ever spending that amount of money on something that I know because of my background as being a laborer that I could just go oh I'll probably be able to figure all this stuff out so that sat in place the plan we are going to do all of the work ourselves except for some things we are going to subcontract out to particular people for example the brick laying I'm not a brick layer I can do it but not as well as someone who does it day in day out so I got in some Brick Layers who I know who are unbelievable and they smash out in a couple of days prior to this I dug all of the footings by hands yes I should have hired a mini Digger to do it but I didn't really want to spend the couple hundred quid for the Digger when a shovel is 10 quid this is how my brain works people I don't really understand it it doesn't make sense but yeah I just hand dug the footings concreted it in and then from that point got these brick layers in and the cost for doing all of this work was I believe just under 10 grand for the brick work going on so that is the materials and the labor combined the steel lint going across where the bifold doors are going to go and whatnot around this time that I realized that my neighbors were quite possibly the worst people I've ever met I can't really use the words I want to explain them but I just want you to imagine just the most bitter resentful human beings and this is on the left hand side of my house I share a party wall with them on the right hand side those neighbors were amazing every other single neighbor lovely just these utter lemons they started complaining about everything about the noise of me taking down the conservatory about the cement mixer going during the day also the unbelievable thing is it turns out my neighbors had just had a renovation on their house so they were more than happy letting every other neighbor deal with their renovation but when it came to someone else doing what they wanted to do they couldn't be having that and the icing on the cake with them was they had the front of their house acid cleaned pressure washed all of the pointing taken out and then the whole front of the house repointed so it looked amazing My Brother and Me decided actually we should do that as well because it looks so nice so I bought the acid I rent Ed a pressure washer and I started work on the front of the house and it was pretty scary cuz I've never done this before and if I messed up well it's the front of the house and that wouldn't be a very good look now I wish I recorded this the neighbor decided she would walk around and start basically arguing with us and that the pressure washer was making a load of noise it's ruining her life how can we be doing this all of that and this is how dumb some people are when we were saying like didn't you just have this done like two weeks ago she couldn't see there's a word I'm looking for but I'm a bit too thick to know it is it a contradiction or something where she's just done this it made a lot of noise everyone else was like oh she's just getting work done to the house that's fine we all have houses we all make noise at some point if we're going to do a renovation or repoint the front of our house but for some reason when anybody else is doing stuff she has to have a go there are some seriously miserable people in this world and unfortunately you do not get to pick your neighbors but anyway we didn't let her negativity ruin the fun that was actually cleaning the front of the house it was really satisfying the acid worked really well to get rid of all of that carbon pollution that was in the Bricks now unfortunately the pointing that was on this house was done with some sort of cement instead of like a lime mixture which meant that the front of the house looked awful so we did need to get the whole of it repointed and yes you could repoint it yourself but that trade is kind of like a plaster or a brick CA where if you do it day in day out you're going to get really good at it and as it was the front of the house we decided to use a professional and to get the whole front of the house all the pointing taken out and then repointed cost 1,800 quid I believe bringing the total for the front of the house looking as it does now to about 2,100 quid which I later found out next door spent six grand getting the front of their house redone now remember we are living in this house as the renovation works are going on so in an ideal world you would gut the entire house and get it back to Brick at the same time however I need to live there so I've got to have my bedroom my bathroom and the temporary kitchen somewhat nice so I can live there so therefore I'm going to have to do this renovation in stages and as you can see so far all of the works hasn't really affected the inside of the house obviously I've got rid of the conservatory we've done the footings we've cleared the guard the brick walls for the extension are now done the next plan was to get the two Loft conversions done so we can kind of separate the house in too once the Loft bedrooms are done I can then move up there and then gut the rest of the house take it all back to Brick and do the proper renovation at that stage cuz I would then have a clean area at the top of the house I can escape to and get away from all the filth that the renovation will inevitably cause now after deciding that was the next step we decided to have one more go at looking for a builder because we were starting to think we could save so much time if somebody was working on this house whilst we were at our day jobs and at this point I was really struggling with time because my side hustles were actually turning into proper businesses and then having a day job on top of that and this renovation I was really really struggling with time now after a few days of looking we came across this person on gum tree and he was a roofer which was great cuz I've slated quite a few rofs but again if the roofer was a fair price I could just get him on the house and then whilst I'm at work he could do that task for me now after meeting and chatting to this roofer we quickly realized that he might be the dodgiest person we have ever met my brother and me both had the same opinion of him you can't trust him as far as you could throw him and at the second he thinks he could get more money out of you he will do it but that being said he had a contact book of loads of different trades and we thought you know what we could save a lot of time if we just got this puppet in and even if he did a half good job it would at least progress us a little bit more than the basically stationary stage that the project was at because my brother and me were struggling so much with time now I've done a separate video on this and explained the whole situation but this guy was exactly who we thought he was but let me introduce to you a saying that a lot of Builders use which is if you pay cheap you pay twice but that is utter crap because if you pay cheap all the materials are there they're all done you might have to fix some clear fups but the timber the slate roof pod extension the new floors the steals all of that stuff cost 30 grand which find somebody to do that work for you in London to even the level that he's done it's not going to happen you're talking more like 70 80 grand now I'm not recommending you to use a cowboy Builder but beggar can't be choosers and I didn't have an option that was the best case scenario for us because the only thing they properly messed up was the lead work and I can fix that really easily now from this point every single piece of work that you see was done by my brother and me except for the plastering an electrician and a plumber now you might be thinking at this point yeah Chris that doesn't really sound like you're doing any of it trust me you do your own renovation you will not believe the list of work that you can't even remember you doing there is so much you hear Plastering you hear painting you hear installing a kitchen but what I'm talking about is how much work goes in to stuff that you will never see me building the brick wall at the front of the house leveling all of the land installing the Steels which I did myself which is pretty scary and then all of the works that goes on around installing the Steels there is so much and half of it is underground you don't see the slab the insulation that's going in the walls building of the stud walls removing the chimney oh my days me removing the chimney that was extremely sketchy but that's what I'm meaning there is so much work that goes on now also if you're wondering about some more costs the scaffolding was six grand for a tin hat roof so that meant that when it was raining because yes this Project's in England it rains a lot it means that the whole thing is watertight which when you're taking the roof off of a house is really really helpful the steals for the extension I think it was around the 34,000 Mark and then the at cros this crane the cement mixer all of those were just hired because some people don't know when you're doing a renovation you might think oh it's quite expensive you're going to need to buy loads of tools it's not actually true because all you actually need to buy is an impact driver a drill and a circular saw you can do an entire renovation pretty much with just those things maybe not when you start tiling because having some good tools when it comes to tiling really helps you out we did every single bathro in this house all four of them well there's five toilets and then four bathroom SL shower rooms if I were to take an average of how much each one of those bathrooms cost you're looking at four five grand for everything from going from stud walls to a finished amazing bathroom I would say that was the average cost now in this area in London if if you are getting someone else in to do that you're looking at 1520 Grand so as I've said in a lot of videos don't be scared of messing up you can afford to mess up when you're tiling because if it's costing you three times less than getting somebody else in to do it that means you could take a sledgehammer to the bathroom two times before you get it right on the third attempt and that's smashing the toilet sink the shower the lot you could just Chuck it all away and start a fresh obviously this is a fullon renov ation every single wall is pretty much getting redone we're knocking walls down we're lowering the basement everything is being juggled you're timing the electricians and the plumber and then you're having to do preparation works for them a rewire of this sort of scale is a little bit dependent on what you're having done as an example if you had 10 spotlights it's going to cost less than if you had 10,000 spotlights it's how long's a piece of string or if anything it's how long's an electrical cable because there's probably miles of it now in this house and a rewire of this scale cost me 5 grand then the plumber all of that work that cost four grand Plus on top of that I paid for the boiler and some other things so just Chuck a couple Grand in miscellaneous things if you start a renovation you better line up a hell of a lot of credit cards because you're going to be making payments that you didn't expect to have to be paying what were some of the big costs during this project first one that comes to mind is waste removal if you're get getting 20 skips that's six grand and then you get the joy of whatever you're getting rid of you're inevitably going to have to then buy a newer shinier version of what you just got rid of and put it back in the house so for example the crap concrete floor that was all in that Conservatory to get the concrete footings we needed 1 M deep footings which is just so over the top it's unbelievable but anyway that was 1,300 quid in concrete alone interestingly the concrete slab which goes obviously under the floor of the entire extension area that was also 1,300 quid the next most aggressive cost of this project was probably the plastering because I mean think about how many walls there are in a house every single wall needs plaster board and plaster on top of it you can get away with skimming some of the walls and therefore that means that you're just adding a layer of plaster onto the existing plaster but because this house was so old the walls and ceilings were crumbling at this stage because it was all LA and plaster so for every single wall and ceiling in this house to be plastered and then plaster boarding where the Steels are that needs fire rated plaster board all of that was just over 10 grand to get done some other big costs that come to mind were the skylights now on the side return extension there were four 2 m by 1 met Skylight and they are 400 quid each the EPDM that goes on the flat roofs that was all in ,000 and before I forget to say the kitchen now this is one of the poshest kitchens I have ever seen the details on it were amazing the glass edges the fact that it is a real inframe Kitchen in comparison to the crap you get from Howen which is just a fake INF frame kitchen don't buy from Howen their quote for this kitchen with a trade account was 205 Grand just go direct and this kitchen that you see here we paid 10 grand grand for everything and then 4 and a half grand for the quartz worktop backsplash all of that stuff and haggling when it comes to anything to do with the building trade it can really make or break your project I'd strongly advise you buying the handle separately don't buy them from wherever you're buying kitchens from because it's a typical way they will upsell you because most people go for the conveniences of just buying the handles where they're buying the kitchens instead we bought all of the handles off of eBay so if we add those two together you get 14 and a half Grand but it's not just that because there's also the appliances and I got 1,000 fridge a 2,000 oven so that brings the total for those things to about 18 and a bit Grand that is by far the most expensive kitchen I've ever built I guess the next most aggressive costs were painting anybody can paint it is extremely easy however we worked out how much time it would take us to paint the house and it was literally 3 weeks so we got a painter in that we knew and we paid him for Grand something that actually really annoys me is the wood flooring that's in the hallway and the kitchen it does not come across on camera how insane it looks in person it looks unbelievable it is real engineered Oak Herring bone flooring and it was the worst thing I've ever had to install but the end result was amazing that is the best money we spent on the house and that was 4 grand as well the bfold doors they were two grand I'll cheuck on the screen now some of the most important videos that I've made that could really help you when it comes to All Things money saving the tiles and the bathrooms were from porcelanosa and porcelanosa is extremely expensive but their tiles do look amazing if you create a trade account you get 60% off so as I was saying earlier these bathrooms they look amazing but they really did not cost the world the main Master bed room on Suite that one was for5 Grand because it had this unbelievable bath every single bathroom was underfloor heated which really doesn't cost very much like I was saying on average the bathrooms in this house all four of them were varying different sizes those two were three grand the other one was 4 grand and then the top one was four closer to 5 grand all in that's everything from the stud wolves to the finished look that you're seeing now we got the entire house recarpeted and the carpet cost a loone 4,800 quid and that was basically every single floor except for obviously the bathrooms the kitchen and the hallway everything else was carpeted and then we paid carpet Fitters 800 quid to install that in total from the point of getting the keys in our hand it took 3 months to get playing permission and then from that 3 month point it took 7 months to do all of the work you have just seen and that is with all of us having fullon day jobs that is every moment of annual leave spent working on this what was once a dump of a house I don't even need to explain to you lot the amount of work and stress that's involved in a renovation project we all know it it's utter misery no matter how big the project is but to be able to walk around this house now with five double bedrooms three on Suites one family bathroom and a downstairs toilet the most insane kitchen that I've ever stepped foot in and for that to now be my kitchen yeah it was a little bit surreal especially as my apartment that I used to have in Tower hamlets could probably fit in just half of that kitchen it was a very surreal feeling I also loved what we did with the garden that Garden in total cost us a few grand so after all of that the one thing I want you to always remember is experts the people that you're paying to be professionals they mess things up as well so don't be so hard on yourself when you inevitably mess up and if you don't know where to begin just go watch all of my recent videos on the tiny house project I am filming every single step of building a new build luxury house everything so there is literally no excuses for you anymore just go and start now your future self will thank you so I hope you've enjoyed this video please like And subscribe it really helps support the channel and we're actually getting very close to my goal of 10,000 subscribers by the end of the year actually if everybody shared this video to one person that would double its exposure that would actually be insane if you could do that now I've been satting in my car outside of the tiny house project for about an hour and a half and I probably should start getting on with some work on it because well I need to move into this thing by December and I've noticed the temperatures started dropping and currently I have no insulation or walls on the tiny house so I will see you next Tuesday in a bit

Channel: Havesomevision

Views: 1,776,310

Keywords: House renovation, London house renovation, Finished home tour, Living room transformation renovation, Home renovation transformation, House transformation, Victorian terrace transformation, Renovation project is finished, Have some vision, Home renovation, Development project, Before and after transformation, How to renovate, 1 YEAR (in 30 minutes) RENOVATING an OLD LONDON VICTORIAN TERRACED HOUSE into DREAM HOME

Id: mklfkLlV6ec

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023