IN THE BIG Reno Clinic series, 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.<\/p>\n
Send your question for Shay to reno@thejournal.ie<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s question:<\/p>\n
What\u2019s a realistic percentage of the overall cost of a renovation for my contingency fund, and what kind of things eat into it?<\/p>\n
Shay says:<\/p>\n
Short answer: 10\u201320%.\u00a0Here\u2019s why, and where that money actually goes\u2026<\/p>\n
Firstly, what is contingency? Well, every renovation job will have a price agreed at the start, but it\u2019s advisable that every homeowner also separately has some money, a percentage of that cost in their back pocket, for the unexpected and unforeseen costs that might come your way during the works. You won\u2019t always need to use your contingency, but if it comes up, you\u2019ll be glad you have it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Every older house has unknowns that only become apparent after it\u2019s been gutted \u2014 rotten joists, defective pipework, structural issues and issues with subfloors. You can\u2019t see them until the house is opened up. But after years as a QS and running a refurbishment company, I can tell you the same issues come up again and again on the same house types.<\/p>\n
A few I see constantly: in Victorian houses with a return, the ceiling joists in the return nearly always need doubling up. In ex-corporation houses, the original concrete subfloor has a bitumen damp-proof layer that degrades over time, rotting the timber floorboards above it \u2014 once that happens, the floor needs to come out and OSB board and levelling compound need to be fitted before you can install your new floor covering. In the worst cases, you\u2019re also treating rising damp \u2013 but generally rising damp is apparent before you start. On bigger jobs, stripping back brick walls sometimes reveals there were never concrete lintels above the doors in the first place or the lintels above the windows are pieces of rotten timber \u2014 or that the house needs underpinning because the foundation is defective<\/p>\n
Where you sit in that 10\u201320% range depends on the age and condition of the house. An apartment I renovated that was built in 2002 that just needed a cosmetic refresh threw up no surprises at all. As a result I didn\u2019t touch the contingency. The 1890 house I\u2019m renovating now has caught me out once so far: stripping the wallpaper revealed the walls were in worse condition than I expected even with my background.<\/p>\n
The trap: a partial renovation is often riskier than a full one. By gutting a house completely and replacing everything, you\u2019re removing a lot of the unknowns, because everything\u2019s being replaced anyway. Renovating a section of house can throw up more surprises. For example opening up a kitchen and dining room into an open-plan space can expose electric, heating or plumbing issues nobody could have foreseen. Whoever\u2019s doing the work then has to decide where to draw the line \u2014 and most will suggest doing a bit more work than strictly necessary to correct the issue, because fixing it properly now prevents the problem resurfacing later.<\/p>\n
Scope creep is the other thing that eats into contingency. That\u2019s when you decide mid-project to do extra work because it makes more sense to do it all in one go. My own attic is a case in point \u2014 I\u2019d planned to just replace the stairs and leave the rest, but once I had the keys I committed to renovating the whole room, and pushed solar panels and repointing the front of the house out to next year instead in order to make my budget work. There\u2019s nothing wrong with my choice, but it\u2019s exactly the kind of decision that draws down your contingency rather than an unforeseen problem.<\/p>\n
And contingency isn\u2019t only for problems \u2014 it also covers upgrades you choose along the way. A tile allowance of \u20ac60\/m\u00b2 becomes \u20ac75\/m\u00b2 once you\u2019ve picked the ones you actually want. A \u20ac25K kitchen budget becomes \u20ac30K. The additional cost of these items comes from the contingency fund too<\/p>\n
Your takeaways:<\/p>\n
Budget 10\u201320% contingency the higher end is for older properties<\/p>\n
Expect house-type-specific issues \u2014 ceiling joists Victorian returns, bitumen-damaged floors in ex corporation houses, missing lintels in older houses, underpinning \u2014 rather than being blind sided by them<\/p>\n
A partial renovation can carry more risk than a full gut job – this is because you\u2019re working with what\u2019s there rather than fully replacing them<\/p>\n
Separate \u201cproblem\u201d contingency from \u201cupgrade\u201d contingency in your own head \u2014 scope creep, and nicer finishes are a choice, not a surprise, and it helps to know which one you\u2019re spending on<\/p>\n
Draw the line in advance for any area you\u2019re opening up but not fully replacing, so you\u2019re not making that call on the fly once walls are already open.<\/p>\n
Shay will be back answering your questions next week. Send him your pressing queries on managing a renovation to reno@thejournal.ie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IN THE BIG Reno Clinic series, Houses to Restore QS Shay Lally provides answers and solutions to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[40823,273784,10635,72,33557,2127,15897,40465,10982,61,60,387,13781,244858,3187],"class_list":["post-644704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-architect","tag-architect-design","tag-builders","tag-business","tag-column","tag-construction","tag-designer","tag-engineers","tag-ideas","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-opinion","tag-renovation","tag-the-big-reno-clinic","tag-voices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}