Shay Lally Quantity surveyor

IN OUR NEW series, The Big Reno Clinic, Houses to Restore QS Shay Lally provides answers and solutions to the big (and little, but important) questions you may have about making the most of your home.

Send your question to reno@thejournal.ie 

This week’s question:

We’ve bought a house that needs new plumbing (currently only has electric heating), new electrics, and insulation. We’re not sure we have the cash for all three. Would you do it bit by bit, or take out a loan and do it all before moving in?

Shay says:

Here’s a question I get asked a lot in some shape or form and it’s a really important decision a homeowner will make. Get it right, and you save yourself thousands. Get it wrong, and you’ll be paying for the same thing twice.

Let me explain why.

Houses are like a jigsaw, not a to-do list

It’s tempting to think of a rewire, a replumb, and insulation as three separate jobs you can tick off one at a time as the money comes in. In reality, they’re deeply tangled up with each other, hidden behind the same plasterboard and under the same floorboards.

To upgrade any one of them, you have to strip the house back,  chase the walls, lift the floors, patch the plaster and repaint the house. But here’s the thing if you do the electrics this year and the heating and plumbing next year, you’ll be undoing and redoing a huge chunk of the strip-out, patchwork and painting only to have to redo it again.

You’re effectively paying twice for the same thing.

So my honest advice is if you can find a way to do it all together, do it all together.

What if the budget genuinely isn’t there?

I’m not a financial advisor and I don’t know the details of your finances so I’m not advising you to take on debt lightly. But, and it’s a big but, if borrowing is the only way to get all three done at once and you’re comfortable with the repayments, it’s usually the more cost-effective route in the long run. Also an empty house is easier to work in as there’s no furniture to protect, nothing to pack away or put into strong and no feeling of living like you’re living on a building site.

If borrowing isn’t an option, there’s one job I’d advise doing and that is insulating.

Insulating your attic and pumping the cavity now, provided you have a cavity to pump, as you save for the rewire and replumb will make the house noticeably warmer and cheaper to run in the meantime, without creating the “undo and redo” problem the other trades cause. That said make sure you hold off on insulating the walls internally, since that forms part of the works involved with upgrading the electrics and plumbing.

One more thing worth flagging; since you’re electric-only with no gas, you’re actually in a good place for the future. Plenty of homeowners are switching to a heat pump when they upgrade their heating system due to the grants available  and an all-electric house is a great starting point.

Related Reads

What does it cost to rewire a 1930s two-up, two-down?

What would it cost to re-do an old, small, extension?

What would it cost to convert my patio into an outdoor 'room'?

The sequence of works matters more than people think

Here’s a tip a plumber once passed on to me that stuck with me – get the plumber in before the electrician. This is because pipework requires long, straight runs and if the electrician gets there first, it can box the plumber into awkward routes. This may seem like a small detail but this small detail has real cost implications.

If you do choose to do everything together, this is roughly the sequence we follow on projects like yours:

1. Make safe first. Electrician isolates the circuits (leaving temporary power), plumber drains the system and shuts off the water (leaving a temporary supply).
2. Strip out. Floor coverings, skirting boards, tiles, and often the ceiling on a two-storey house come out, since running cables and pipes through the ceiling joists is usually the easiest path. Planning to insulate internally? The window walls get stripped back now too.
3. First fix. Plumber goes in first, then the electrician, chasing walls and floors as needed.
4. Patch and insulate. Walls and ceilings get repaired, and if you’re insulating internally, this is when that happens.
5. Second fix. Electrician first, then plumber.
6. Fit your floors and skirtings. Then paint.
7. Insulate your attic before painting but get your requirements from the attic insulation company early and pass them on to your electrician and plumber at quoting stage, so nothing gets missed in their prices.

The bottom line

Whether you bring in a main contractor or choose to manage the project yourself as a self-build style project, the principle doesn’t change: the order of work is important and doing and paying the work once beats doing doing and paying for the same work twice.

If the cash isn’t there for everything, insulate what you can now and be patient with the rest; but resist the urge to chip away at the rewire and replumb piecemeal. Your future self (and your wallet) will thank you.

Shay will be back answering your questions next week.

Send him your queries on managing a renovation to reno@thejournal.ie