My mid-fifties two-bed semi is starting (?) to show it's age so I've decided to have a complete internal makeover. I'm somewhat at a loss as to where to start. I've prepared a list of the major items I'm planning to have carried out:
Complete rewire.
Complete replacement of existing central heating system including radiators and piping (currently an old gas back-boiler system).
New bathroom.
New kitchen.
Complete replacement of skirting board in all downstairs rooms (this is because I rewired the sockets back in the 1970's and installed the sockets in the skirting board. The 8-inch high skirting will be replaced with smaller skirting so some replastering will almost certainly be required.
After all this major work is complete the whole house will obviously need redecorating.
If I employ individual contractors for each major job, what order would you recommend carrying out each job? Would you recommend individual contractors for each of the main jobs or would I be better off employing one builder to do the whole lot?
Your opinions much appreciated. Please be gentle with me - I'm an old man :-)
It's a major renovation all right ! You certainly _could_ go throught the grief of having different tradesmen for each job - but you'll go crazy trying to organise everything in the right sequence. Also you run the risk of the plumber blaming the electrician who is blaming the plasterer.....
It'll possibly be more expensive to get one builder in to manage the whole lot - but at least then you only have one backside to kick if there are problems!
Make sure you have a very clearly defined / agreed specification of what is and what isn't included.....
Are you a rich old man? It's going to cost plenty!
I'd seriously consider using the opportunity to improve the energy efficiency and comfort of the house as well as its physical appearance. With the amount of work you're doing you might consider ripping up the ground floors and installing underfloor heating, and possibly taking down the ground-floor ceilings and putting UFH in the upstairs rooms (from below rather than ripping up their floors), which should give you worthwhile energy savings and improved comfort (warm toes/cool head rather than the other way round). Plus you can (would want to anyway) insulate under the ground floors which, on a house of that period, will have icy draughts circulating under the floor from your air bricks. (Have you got cavity wall insulation? Double glazing?)
If you wanted to rip up your garden at the same time you could put in a ground-source heat pump!
Whether or not you go so far I'd go for individual tradespeople rather than whoever - good, bad or indifferent - a builder happens to have available, and get them to liaise. You may find some of your trades knows good people for others. You'll need a plumbing & heating engineer for the CH, a sparks, kitchen and bathroom fitters, chippy and spread, but you may not need different people for all these: you plumber may do some or all of the bathroom and at least the plumbing of the kitchen, and your kitchen fitter may do your skirtings, one person may do plastering or tiling ... be flexible and find people who are flexible too. And get recommendations, not people out of the yellow pages etc. And certainly not package kitchens & bathroom from Dolphin or B&Q or anyone like that.
As for materials, listen to your tradespeople: if you throw a lot of cheap tat at them and ask them to fit it they'll likely do a cheap tatty job.
In terms of running order the CH and rewiring come first, making good later (natch), and the bathroom and kitchen can (depending on who's doing them) run simultaneously with the plumbing and electrics, but they'll certainly need to liaise.
Not quite sure how you work out underfloor heating is more energy efficient? It's not. The important thing to save energy is better insulation - and although underfloor heating may help with this as part of the installation there are far cheaper ways.
I think the idea is that by radiating heat into the contents of a space (the human contents being what you're after, but the system doesn't know that) rather than raising the temperature of the air within the space, you reduce ventilation losses and a fair amount of the fabric losses. When you think about spaces with high roofs (our school has a hall with a roof that's about 20' at its apex) it makes sense in an arm-waving, intuitive way.
I admit I'm going on figures (e.g. "20%") bandied around by manufacturers of UFH systems: I don't know if the BRC or anyone has independent test results to show one way or the other.
Well the way to do this is to first strip out everything you can so as to leave the plumbers and electricians free run.
That may meana using a jury rigged kitchen for a while.
Plumbing an electrical first fix - basically the wiring and piping, often can go in together, since they may want the same floorboards up at the same time.
Once all that's done the two trades will be working independently The plumber mainly round the boilers, and teh sparks around te p[atress boxes.
HOWEVER tis is when the plasterers need to get in, before the actual final fix electrics and te radiators go in.
So I;'d say te order should be
strip out. new consumer unit and first fix wires New boiler/tank etc and first fix copper. Plaster and redecorate all rooms bar kitchen bathroom Second fix plumbing, with boiler/radioatosr going in, and kitchen/bathroom installed Second fix electrics, with face plates and plugs and so on going in. Second decoration to tidy up bathroom tiling/painting and ditto kitchen and boiler room.
Rewire first, because it will make a lot of mess, unless you already have conduit and can just re-thread cables.
Then heating as it will make a bit of mess, but at least you'll have a nice new electrical installation to connect it to. Sparks will have the floors up so plumber might as well go straight in afterwards.
Bathroom maybe next. Then kitchen. Don't think it matters too much. Kitchen electrics can be done prior or at the same time, but not after or your new units and tiles will suffer.
Make good (ie plaster up all the holes and chases - assume the kitchen and bathroom are sorted seperately in this respect). This can be done as you go or saved for a plasterer to do at least after the electric or electrics and plumbing depending on how much damage results from doing the heating.
Skirting second to last.
Re-decorate.
This assumes that you want to get each trade in and do their bit entirely, which would be the more common approach.
It would be possible, with a bit of planning to do some enabling works (new boiler, CU) then attack rooms one by one, finishing each one off before starting the next, doing ground floor first, then upstairs - but it would of course mean each trade getting lots of bitty jobs which might be difficult to arrange.
If you can find a builder by recommendation, and he's good, he *could* sub-contract and manage the others which might reduce your problems. Quite often, IME, you either get a small firm with a builder, plasterer, plumber and sparks - or they form loose co-operatives and call each other in and one of them manages the job. The advantage in both cases is that if the builder books the sparks, the sparks will actually turn up when he's supposed to because either he's a mate or an employee. Also removes arguments. If you book them all and manage them, what happens if the plaster messes up the spark's work, the plumber needs the builder to have done something, but the builder's delayed - then it's your fault.
If you could provide some background, folk might be able to tune the advice better.
Can you move out while the work happens (eg one month holiday)? Do you have lots of possessions and people in the house or is it just you and the wife?
It's going to be quite disruptive and the more space you can give the trades, and the less you require them to leave you with a semi functioning house at the end of each day, the easier (and quicker) it will be. At the very least, I'd store the good stuff (computers, TV, hifi, fine art, etc) at a friend's house or in storage for the brunt of the work.
This isn't to say the job can't be done otherwise, but if you can make it easier for the men to work, you worry less, they'll finish quicker and you'll be back to normal.
Sorry if that's a bit rambly - been stuck on the M25 for 3 1/2 hours doing
10 miles and I'm a bit dead >-|
But before you start worrying to death about this, take some time and start deciding what fittings you want and how you want the job to be done. That's the fun bit and it'll be the first question they'll ask when you invite them to quote.
I'll just add, if my previous reply seemed to take no notice of other people's replies, it's because the threading in my newsreader just fell apart and I didn't see any of them till after I scrolled way down.
The amount of radiation from a heated floor will be tiny. It will heat the area by convection - same as ordinary radiators.
The area won't be comfortable for relaxing in until the air temperature is uniform at the required amount.
Common sense. For underfloor heating to be more efficient than rads when they both use the same hot water, the heat from the rads would have to be wasted in some way.
So conversely, for UFH to be *less* efficient than rads - as you claim
- it would have to waste heat in some way. Agreed that in a badly installed ground-floor UFH system a lot of heat could be wasted by conduction downwards, but assuming effective insulation underneath this should not be so. However anyone who's climbed a step-ladder in a rad-heated room knows that much of the heat is wasted in making the upper air unnecessarily (and uncomfortably) hot.
But "the required amount" is less if one's feet are relatively warm compared to the rest of one's body, as one gets with UFH, rather than the other way round, as with rads. (That's the claim, anyway.)
I dint think UFH is on it own more or less efficient. Its certainly NICER than radiators..the overall heating effect is so even there are few hot spots or cold places.
My screed based system is however *extremely* long time constant. Probably due to it being thicker than it should have been. That mens a more sophisticated system for control would probably help efficiency.
UFH in screed loses out when you have rooms switched off, and want to get them rapidly warm.
There is so MUCH mass in the floors here, that the temperature stays relatively constant for several hours after the heating goes off.
It is a completely different feel and modus operandi to radiators. You have to anticipate the evening cold, get the thing on early, but you can cut it a couple of hours before going to bed.
So you've no windows that the sun streams in through?
And that helps the efficiency?
I'm sure there are pros and cons but much higher efficiency ain't one of them. I'd guess the OP has been watching too many TV progs where it's used as with heat pump systems.
I do because it's firkin cold without, since we've only got rads in most of the rooms. In the one room (kitchen) which does have UFH it's quite pleasant to go barefoot. I notice a lot of the UFH ads show people in bare feet or lounging around on the floor, which you'd not be doing in a conventionally heated place unless you had 2" thick fur rugs on the floor :-)
Whilst I'm not advocating heating houses to the levels you can run around naked in winter (I'm of that generation where we tried to save stuff, including energy, rather than chuck it away needlessly) I'd prefer soemwhere I can walk around in socks or bare feet and a jumper rather than fur-lined boots and a tee-shirt.
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