Advice on various house improvement projects

[gidrae]

Me and the missus are about to buy a house (well a bungalow that had the roof converted to bedrooms/bathrooms) that is also a bit of a project too.
We will have the following work that needs to be done and wondered if anyone had any experience of how much these would likely cost (won't be doing these ourselves!!!)

• Internal wall removing in the kitchen - this houses an old boiler and has a chimney flue/stack that will need removing and putting right. A new boiler will be fitted to the external wall in the kitchen or possibly moved up stairs (directly above where it is now) in a small office room.
• Brick single garage with pitched roof to be removed as the roof is sagging and the bricks have slipped making it dangerous
• Potential underpinning of the side of the house as we can see repointing has been done but the mortar has cracked a little again (no bricks cracked)

Any pointers would be helpful. We have a decent budget to get this work done (30k+)

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

Sounds about right given the scant info.

 

[HawkEye244]

Demolition of the garage + internal brick wall, probably be £3500 - £4000. This is based on 3-4 labourers + gaffer overseeing. Should take no longer than a week to do both demo jobs.. but if you want the foundations/concreting of the garage removed that will be the hard part. There is the cost of hiring of tools (medium duty breakers for example) to consider + HD rubble bags + skips + barrows (in some cases). I would not be surprised in excess of 4k. You would be shocked at the commerical cost of having to dispose of trade waste..money is better spent on skips, two 8 yards will set you back around £400 which includes the disposal rate of what's in it.. either way you see how the costs add up.

Underpinning will depend on how many metres are being underpinned and dependant on access availability and site conditions, existing services etc. Someone here should be able to give you an approximate per metre rate.

A new decent boiler will generally be about £800-1200 + £800-1000 to fit (includes extending and alteration of pipes/gas, buggeration etc). If you draw a plan of the bungalow it would be easier to understand what's involved.

Removal of the chimney stack I wouldn't like to guess without seeing the job.

 

[gidrae]

thanks freddie and especially Hawkeye for approximations.
I will try and draw up some plans of what we are intending to do, not in the house yet but should be within the next month. It's going to be a building site for a while

 

[gidrae]

Here is the layout. The wall where the Hallway is we want to remove however, the far end (opposite the sink) is where the Boiler is housed and has a flue) will either need to be move(replaced with a new boiler) upstairs into the "study" adding a vent and making that a nice walk in airing cupboard, or adding a new boiler to downstairs wall.


Also thinking of doing away with the downstairs Bedroom and opening the window into a new front door to make a decent hall (with a cupboard to the right)
and opened a door up into the Sitting Room. Would just need to twist the stairs to the right and board up the current opening of the stairs adjacent to the downstairs toilet.

The current entrance porch could be turned into a utility room
Upstairs the bedroom two is actually about 8x11 (13+ at the widest)

Any other ideas are gratefully welcome