What Will it Cost? - Internal Finishes

The internal finishes you choose for your home should be worked into your budget as early as possible. Mark Brinkley explains.

For the purposes of clarity, we have includ­ed in this section all wall and floor finishes, second fix carpentry and inter­nal joinery, kitchens and bathrooms. It’s a huge cost area: on our test house, these inter­nal finishes came to over £50,000 — 40% of the overall build total. Whilst the house was finished to an above-average spec­ification, it was by no means extrav­agantly done by contemporary standards and many of the items installed are fairly typical of what many self-builders are choosing today.

Floors

Of all the aspects of contemporary house­building, floor finishes are perhaps the most prone to changes in fashion. Twenty years ago, wall-to-wall carpeting was seen as a must-have item: today, it’s seen as somewhat passé. Same, too, with cork tiling, which has gone from being laid on virtually every kitchen and bathroom floor to being almost unob­tainable from normal sources.

The two big winners have been hardwood and ceramic or stone tiles. Interestingly, budget doesn’t seem to figure as one of the key drivers behind these changes: all these floor covers are available at a wide range of costs.

Our test house was finished to a fairly high standard, using a mixture of both ceramic tiles and wood flooring throughout. The spend was just under £11,000, or 8% of the total, of which around 65% was the cost of the materials and 35% the cost of laying. This indicates a higher than average quality on materials: a more normal ratio would be 50:50 on materials and labour.

Internal Walls and Ceilings

Internal walls and ceilings tend to get a plastered finish, whether it be wet plaster or one of the dry board methods. It’s a large section of the overall budget (£10,000 or 7% on our test house, not including painting) but there isn’t a lot of choice in the matter as plastering or dry-lining remains the most cost-effective option. People will argue endlessly about which actual plastering method is cheapest, but the fact is that there isn’t a huge amount to choose between them.

However, should you choose to finish your walls in tiles or timber or wallpaper – in fact almost anything except a simple plastered and painted finish – you can expect to pay a good deal more.

Wall tiling tends to be favoured in kitchens and bathrooms, for obvious reasons, and it’s one of the factors that makes kitchens and bathrooms so much more expensive to build than bedrooms or living rooms.

Internal Joinery

This includes doors, stairs, skirtings, archi­traves, landings and balustrades. Every room in the house requires some second fix and, therefore, like plastering, its cost is something of a given. The overall spend on our test house for these items was £7,700 (6% of the overall total), of which nearly £5,000 was materials. This may seem high but in fact around £3,000 of this was for doors, two of which were specials, made up for the living room and sun lounge. On a slightly less expensive job, this could be reduced to per­haps 5% of the overall budget.

However, the layout of our benchmark house is relatively simple and the staircase and landing arrangement, in particular, is quite conservative. Large hallways, gallery landings and curved staircases combined will add many thousands to the overall build cost, as will exciting materials such as glass and steel.

As with most aspects of fitting out, there is a huge range of prices you can pay but, as a general standard, you can anticipate that finishing the walls, ceilings and floors, includ­ing door hanging and staircase fitting will cost around 25% of your overall budget. To build these features in to the dreaded ‘developer standard’, which is a good cosmetic min­imum, you should anticipate spending some­where in the region of £150-£200/m2.

Kitchens and Bathrooms

Every house has to have a kitchen and at least one bathroom, but the cost of providing these amenities is perhaps the most elastic of all costs to be considered. Kitchens for detached houses can be installed for as little as £4,000, including all the white goods: on the other hand, designer kitchens can easily cost ten times this amount. Bathroom furni­ture isn’t subject to such extreme price differences but there is, nevertheless, a significant cost difference between basic and top of the range. The benchmark house showed kitchen costs of £13,000 (10%) and sanitaryware costs of £3,500 (3%).

Budget Tips

Most self-builders are looking for mid-range quality in both kitchens and bathrooms and obviously it pays to shop around and select goods at competitive prices. That much goes without saying. There are also some useful design guidelines worth considering at the outset, which may serve to minimise your overall expense without compromising quality.

The internal areas of the house where the costs are greatest are invariably the kitchen and the bathroom. You have all the inherent costs of finishing the rooms to the same standard as bedrooms and living rooms, plus you have the added costs of fitting out with equipment, not to mention specialised wall and floor coverings. The kitchen area is particularly suitable to cost pruning: why store plates, pots and pans in expensive kitchen cabinets when they could just as well be stored in a cheaper utility area? And why build in long lengths of worktop when the actual working area required is usually rather small? Think of building a larger utility room, which can act as a laundry, storage space and mud room, and installing a smaller kitchen area. The kitchen specialists won’t appreciate this advice but it will save you thousands.

Also question the assumption that a family home isn’t complete without an en suite bathroom, and just possibly two. The en suite bathroom is a fashion which has spread from North America where, in some houses, every bedroom now has its own en suite, plus its own dressing room. It has never caught on in Continental Europe where the family bathroom concept still holds sway. Most families would find it far more useful to have one really well-equipped bathroom (with showers and baths) and a smaller WC room rather than separate bathrooms and shower rooms, which seems to be the current British practice.

Your internal finishes should reflect the potential market for the house; a contract-style kitchen will look cheap in a £400,000 house, but a much wiser choice if the house is going to be worth a quarter of this. Likewise, over-specifying is just as foolish.

About These Articles

This series is based on a typically constructed, 4/5 bedroom house, with an internal floor area of 200m2 (2,150 sq.ft.) plus an integral garage. Its raw build cost (that is only labour and materials) is £135,000. Professional fees, contractors’ overheads and profit, insurances and warranties would all be in addition to this. The raw build cost presumes a straightforward job finished to a fairly basic standard; the sort of finish you would expect from a professional housebuilder. In this series we will be looking at how the costs break down for all the various component parts of a house, and looking at the cost implications of choosing alternatives. This house is also featured in Mark Brinkley’s latest book, The Housebuilder's Bible (6th edition).

OTHER COST GUIDES:

• Getting out of the ground
• Insulation
• External Joinery
• Constructing Walls
• Installing Services
• Roofing