Four Things We Overspent On During Renovation

Our complete renovation isn’t over yet. But now the bulk of it has been done and our initial renovation budget has been spent I thought I’d reflect on some of the things we overspent on during the process. Recently I did a post on general things which will cause you to go over budget. But these things are specifics from our budget that we didn’t allow enough money for.

I don’t think that we went for anything too extravagant in our house, even though we’d have liked to. If we’d had a huge house we’d had got lifts for home use, or if we had a huge garden we’d have looked into a built-in hot tub. But our renovations have been lower key.

Hiring skips and rubbish removal

This is an ongoing cost as we need to get another rubbish removal visit booked in. I think I was quite naive when it came to thinking about how much rubbish we’d have. And how much room it would take up. I thought two skips would be more than enough for us. And that anything additional we could take to the dump ourselves. But this was far from the truth. We did have two skips but we’ve had three rubbish removal visits with a fourth happening soon after writing this post.

Neither me nor Luke really looked into the costs of skips or the logistics of rubbish removal so we put a budget of £300 aside for it. Which when I look back is laughable as a single skip isn’t much off of that cost. Including the rubbish removal, we have pending we’ll have spent £1700 in this area. So that’s a huge one of the things we overspent on during the renovation. If you’re planning a large-scale renovation of multiple rooms or things which involve changing bit things like doors/ floors/ bathrooms be prepared with a decent budget for this area.

Things we overspent on: Flooring

Out of all of the things we overspent on the flooring was the smallest overspend, to be honest. We gave ourselves a modest budget of 4K to get new flooring throughout (excluding bathrooms). So that was wood flooring in the kitchen diner and office. Then carpet in the living room, three bedrooms, and hallway/ stairs. We were well in budget with the actual carpet/ wood and the small labour costs we had to spend.

For us, the two main areas that caused us to overspend was latex for under the wooden flooring and the stairs. The kitchen area used to have tiles on the floor and they were stuck down well. So what we had to do was put a layer of latex over the whole floor to get it all even and ensure the wooden flooring was flat. This was a cost we hadn’t even considered or thought about when we budgeted. And then for the stairs, we got a runner made from the same carpet we had throughout and then we bought stair rods. Again these are small things we hadn’t even considered when we put our budget together.

If you’re getting a runner on your stairs you can buy one made as is. But if you want to get the same carpet as the hallway for example you can get the edges whipped and the carpet made into a runner for the stairs which is what we did. Overall we only went about £400-500 over budget for this, so compared to the other things we overspent on it wasn’t that bad.

Ensuite

We originally set aside 3K to do our ensuite but ending up spending just over 4.1K in the end. There are a number of reasons for this including the indulgent shower that we ended up going for. You can find out more about that in my ensuite reveal. We had also planned to make a mirrored cabinet but instead bought one which worked out more expensive than we’d planned.

For us we budgeted based on the suite prices, the tile prices, and a little extra for finishing bits/ paying our tiler, etc. But the room ended up needing quite a lot of materials for the plumbing which changed a lot. And for things like building the step and the surround for the shower tray. I’m 100% happy that we overspent on this area as I absolutely love the room. I think if you’re going to avoid some of the things we overspent on put aside additional money if the plumbing is going to need to change due to layout.

Things we overspent on- Plastering

Oh, plastering. This was the toughest part of our renovation because due to COVID the company that makes multi finish plaster shut down for a period. And there was a countrywide shortage of the plaster. We put off our plastering on a number of occasions because nowhere had it. And eventually, we couldn’t put it off any longer so we bought it from sellers online. The guy we ended up buying it from sold it to us for the price he paid (as he had had a job fall through). But it ended up costing about £25 a bag when it retails for about £8 each! And we needed about 25 bags of the stuff.

Yes, yes, I know it’s a ridiculous amount of money but we needed it. And we were a little stuck without it. Stores and building merchants didn’t get it back in for about a month. And if we’d waited that long we’d have been so behind on schedule and not moved in within August. So considering the things we overspent on it was something we had budgeted for (at the correct price). But ended up having to just suck it up and pay more.

If you’ve renovated how do the things we overspent on compare to what you overspent on?

Pin It