How to Halve Your Renovation Costs - Part Two

ABOVE: £118.78 - Ideal Standard's Studio 60cm Pedestal Basin (01482 346461)

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Low costs do not have to equal low-quality finishes when it comes to renovating old properties — there are many ways to keep a lid on your budget. Here, Natasha Brinsmead reveals how she and her husband, Bill, kept down costs during their Victorian house renovation.

MIX AND MATCH

One of the cleverest and most effective ways of saving money when renovating is to mix more expensive items with cheap off-the-shelf buys. Kitchens are the perfect room in which to employ this technique. Don’t be fooled into thinking you must have the highest quality unit carcasses when in reality they will never be on show. Likewise, cheaper unit doors can really be transformed by the addition of high-quality cabinet knobs and handles, or a solid wood worktop. Many of the most fantastic kitchens featured in H&R have been given this treatment.

Likewise, simple, standard sanitaryware can be dressed up with smart brassware and bathroom accessories.

THE WINDOWS
More than any other external feature, it is the windows that have the biggest impact on the appearance of a house

ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: £200 +VAT for Andersen Windows' Woodright 'insert window'; £800 to have the two side sashes and the main sash made

It is vital not to compromise on quality when it comes to this aspect of your renovation, but as many renovators are acutely aware, replacing windows can swallow up an enormous portion of your budget.

There are several ways in which you can keep costs down without ruining the façade of your house. In some, but not all, cases, it can be cheaper to repair existing period windows as opposed to buying replacements — this will be determined by the extent of any damage. Peeling paintwork, a stuck sliding sash or the odd cracked pane of glass may look unsightly, but will be far cheaper to put right than it would be to get a new window made up. However, in cases of extreme rot and decay, replacement will usually be the most cost-effective option.

The cheapest option is usually white PVCu in a standard size — but when it comes to period houses this is not necessarily the best option. This is partly due to the fact that period houses rarely have standard-size window openings and partly because PVCu can never really look as good as timber replacements for this style of house. However, if you are renovating a more modern, but unfashionable, house such as many of those built during the 1950s to 1970s, then you might want to consider this option.

Be aware that although softwood window frames can be less than PVCu, costs rise once you have had them glazed and painted. However, if you choose some of the better quality PVCu windows, they can easily work out more expensive.

When it comes to a maintenance issue, PVCu windows do require less than timber, but cannot really be repaired.

Our windows had been replaced some time ago with aluminium top-opening versions that looked totally out of place, so we had no option but to replace. We chose softwood as opposed to hardwood as it is the cheaper option, but found that the boxes for our sashes were still in place — check for this as very often they were simply boarded up, and frames and boxes are exposed to less weather damage than the sashes themselves, meaning you will only have to have the sashes themselves made up. Andersen Windows has recently launched a product aimed directly at renovators, the Woodwright® ‘insert window’. Made from a blend of fibre-bonded reclaimed pine wood and a specially formulated thermo plastic polymer, it looks like wood yet there is no need for painting. They cost more than PVCu but less than timber. We ended up paying around £350 for a new set of sashes to fit an internal window opening of 990mm x 1,530mm, not including fitting.

DON'T BE A SNOB

Never turn your nose up at DIY warehouses, small local, perhaps ‘unfashionable’, firms, and flat-pack furniture companies. It may not sound nearly as impressive to tell visitors that you got your kitchen from Units ’r’ Us down the road as it would to say it is from some high-end, hard-to-pronounce German company, but the fact that they have asked you where it is from in the first place means they are impressed, so you can feel smug in the knowledge that you have saved yourself money and if your pride really does end up getting in the way… lie.

Kitchens, bathrooms and wall and floor tiles are perhaps the best example. Having decided upon 10cm x 10cm matt white wall tiles for our kitchen we were shocked to find that the ones we liked in the brochure of a top-end retailer came in at over £100/m2. After searching around we found near identical tiles on a floor and wall tile website (www.wallsandfloors.co.uk) for under £10/m2. When it came to our kitchen, most of the quotes we had back from specialist kitchen companies were well over our budget. Eventually, we had it made for us in solid pine, supplied unpainted. A pine kitchen may not have been what we had in mind, and the work that went into knotting, priming, sanding and painting the whole thing may have almost driven us mad, but we now have a well-made, painted Shaker-style kitchen that cost us just £1,500.

There are some amazing bargains to be found from many of these retailers and, providing you don’t kit your whole house out to look like one of their room sets and don’t mind carrying out the odd bit of customisation, then no one will suspect a thing.

THE BATHROOM
Whilst the bathroom is not the place to cut corners, there are many ways to get a stylish new suite on a budget.

The first rule of keeping costs down in the bathroom is to try, as much as possible, to avoid moving the plumb - ing around. When renovating, you are likely to have an old-fashioned suite, worn-out flooring and poor-quality, rusty, limescale-riddled brassware — and the most common course of action is to rip the whole thing out and start again. However, unless you are relocating or extending the bathroom, you may well find that the original layout of the room makes sense, in which case the plumbing fittings can be left where they are.

Beware trying to save too much money when it comes to buying your sanitaryware. Although there are some impressivesounding deals to be had when it comes to buying complete suites, their quality tends to be questionable. Avoid cheap acrylic baths and shower trays which squeak and bend when any weight is applied. Far better to go for a simple steel bath, which can then be built in with a smart tiled surround. Basically, the old adage applies — if a price sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.

THE DOORS
Whether you have the originals in place or need to buy new doors, don’t feel you have to spend a fortune.

ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: £24.99 for a Premium Knotty Pine Victorian Door from Wickes'; £150 - French Doors from eBay, glazing cost another £80

There are many ways in which to save money when it comes to doors. Many renovators find that the existing doors are still in place, albeit covered with layers of paint in shades not to their taste, or boarded over with chipboard to provide a flush rather than panelled look – as was the fashion during the 1950s and 1960s – in which case restoring them is usually a cheaper and easier option that buying new ones. In our case, our doors were both boarded over and covered in layers of green and pink paint. We chose to have ours acid-dipped as opposed to sandblasted as this technique tends to be gentler on old timber. To get an internal door acid-dipped cost us just £14 per door and left us free to wax, stain or paint our doors as we wished.

Of course, you might not be lucky enough to find yourself with the original doors still in place. In this case think about whether you will want to paint your doors or maintain a natural finish. If painting doors, consider buying inexpensive pine doors off-the-shelf from a DIY warehouse such as B&Q or Wickes, or a timber merchant such as Magnet Trade. These can cost from around £25 per door, can be hung on a DIY basis and, though they may not have the weight and substance of a traditional period door, will look pretty good once painted — just remember to apply a knotting solution and to use a good-quality undercoat before painting to ensure they keep on looking good.

Buying doors from a reclamation yard is another option. You will often find that salvage yards stock hundreds of different doors, but more often than not, the doors will be in no particular order of size or style, so be prepared to search through lots of doors to find the one you are looking for. You might find that the salvage yard has some period doors that have already been glazed and reconditioned, but these are often very expensive and it usually works out far cheaper to have the doors stripped and reglazed yourself — you should also find it pretty easy to hang new doors on a DIY basis.