
Rogue water can cause all sorts of problems, so it’s worth getting someone who knows their stuff and can make sure you’ve put everything in the best place to optimise things like water pressure. I spent months ogling freestanding copper bathtubs, enormous marble-clad rainfall showers and his-and-hers vanity units what I should have done is focus firmly on the plumber I hired – as in the end we had to sack one lot and find another at very short notice. Spend on a plumber, save on bathroom fittings
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Don’t forget internet access too – think about whether you want to install an Ethernet cable system if you’ve got a large house where Wi-Fi boosters won’t cut it. Put everything on dimmers so that you can change the mood of the room by raising or lowering the lighting levels, and don’t forget to install an outside plug – ideal for those garden fairy lights, and you can extend off it if you want to incorporate more garden lighting or wire out to a garden office later on. If you prefer lamps to harsh overhead lighting (me), a separate five-amp circuit for lamps is useful in, for example, the sitting room, as it allows you to turn all the lamps on and off with one switch. You’ll probably want at least one double socket on either side of a double bed, for example, and sockets with USB ports are useful for overnight phone charging. This is really hard, but is also where having some architects’ drawings, or a rough layout, can come in handy, as you can work out where you want furniture to go, which in turn affects placement of things like switches and plug sockets. Electrics go in early – so make sure you’re prepared
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And if a contractor says they’re free to start the job next week, be suspicious: the good ones get booked up, so get organised and be prepared to wait if necessary. But don’t sit on quotes, as prices can go up – check how long they’re valid for.

We hired different individual contractors to rewire, take out chimneys, put up stud walls, plaster, fit bathrooms, lay the kitchen floor and decorate – it was laborious and time-consuming, but at the end of it we had a handful of really good names in our address book of tradesmen we will definitely use again (as well as some we definitely won’t).Īs a rough rule of thumb, you shouldn’t be paying more than about £250 a day for contractors, so if they quote you a sky-high figure, ask them how long they think the job will take them. Right at the outset of the process, I signed up an architect friend, who has exquisite taste ( Olivia Gordon) to do me a set of drawings for the house, with the idea that we’d then employ a builder to execute the work.


A set of architects’ drawings is worth the money Also, we were on a budget – as much as I would have loved to call in a top-end architect and interior designer to oversee the whole thing, sadly that wasn’t an option.Ī year and a half later, and we’re finally in – marriage surprisingly intact, finances gradually recovering. Rewire, replumb, build, lay floors, add walls and doors, work out exactly where we wanted all the light switches to go. We had to do everything and I mean everything. I say a house – it was actually more of a building site: walls stopped several feet short of the floor, the enormous hot water tank was temporarily plumbed into the middle of the kitchen and a perilous ladder took you up to the semi-completed top floor.īut it was in the right location we calculated that building into the side return and extending at the back meant we could make it big enough for our needs (we have three children) and, crucially, it was within budget, so we took the plunge, and embarked on a hefty renovation project. A couple of years ago, my husband and I bought a house.
