Whole Home Renovations near you

Builders and homeowners use the phrase back to brick to mean very different depths of work, and the gap between them is where budgets go wrong. Settling on a level before anyone prices anything is the single most useful hour of the project.

Work to an existing building is normally standard-rated for VAT, but HMRC's public notice on buildings and construction sets out a reduced rate of 5% for renovating or altering an eligible dwelling that has not been lived in during the two years immediately before the work starts. The conditions are cumulative: the premises must be qualifying residential premises, they must not have been lived in for two years or more, a valid certificate must be held where one is needed, and the services must be qualifying services.

Two details decide most cases. The first is proof. HMRC says evidence that a building has not been lived in can come from Electoral Roll and Council Tax records, utilities companies, Empty Property Officers in local authorities or any other reliable source, and that a letter from an Empty Property Officer certifying two years empty removes the need for other evidence. The second is the timing test: if the premises have not been lived in during the two years immediately before the work starts, all of the work is reduced-rated even if someone moves in while it is going on, provided they move in after the work starts. But if the premises are already being lived in when work starts, or were lived in during the previous two years, all of the work is standard-rated. Occasional occupation counts as being lived in, so a second home used now and then does not qualify.

There is a separate 5% route for conversions that change the number of dwellings. A qualifying conversion happens where, after the work, the premises contain a greater or lower number of single household dwellings, but not where the number of dwellings in part of the premises is unchanged. HMRC's own worked examples make the limit clear: work unrelated to changing the number of dwellings cannot be reduced-rated, so refurbishing the untouched flats in a block while splitting one of them does not bring the whole job into the reduced rate.

A whole-house refurbishment will almost always contain work that needs building regulations approval, even where planning permission is not in question. GOV.UK's list of alteration projects for which you might need approval reads like a refurbishment schedule in miniature: replacing fuse boxes and connected electrics, installing a bathroom that involves plumbing, changing electrics near a bath or shower, replacing windows and doors, replacing roof coverings on pitched and flat roofs, installing or replacing a heating system, and adding radiators to one. It also warns that work not on the list can still need approval or special rules.

Choose the route deliberately. In England and Wales you may apply to your local council's building control department or to a private registered building control approver, who will give an initial notice to the local authority. For a project of this size a full plans application is the sensible choice: a decision is expected within five weeks, or two months with your consent, and the completion certificate usually follows within eight weeks of the work finishing so long as it complies. A building notice, which lets work start two days after submission but produces no formal approval, is intended for smaller projects.

Where individual elements are installed by a tradesperson registered with a competent person scheme, that installer can self-certify their own work and notify the local authority themselves, and must give you a certificate within eight weeks of completion. Keep those certificates with the completion certificate. GOV.UK notes both that the person doing the work could be prosecuted and fined for not complying with the regulations, and that without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when you sell.

The order of a whole-house job is not a matter of taste. Every wet trade has to dry, every service has to be tested before it is buried, and every inspection has to happen while the thing being inspected is still visible. A programme that pulls finishes forward to make the house feel like progress is a programme that will be opened up again.

The broad sequence is: survey and consents; make the building watertight and structurally safe; strip out; structural work and repairs; first fix of electrics, plumbing and heating; insulation and airtightness, with the building control inspection while it can still be seen; plastering; drying; second fix; decoration; and finally floor coverings and anything soft. External work that needs scaffolding is best brought forward so the scaffold is erected and struck once. Nothing about that order is unique to Britain, but two things about British houses complicate it: solid walls and suspended timber floors both need drying time that modern construction does not, and terraces mean shared party structures where noisy work has to be timed around neighbours who did not choose your project.

Plan for the household as well as the building. A whole-house refurbishment is usually the point at which living in the property stops being sensible, and the cost of somewhere else to live for the duration belongs in the budget from the start rather than appearing as a surprise in month three.

HSE states that asbestos may be part of any commercial or domestic building built or refurbished before the year 2000, and that it was widely used until 1999, when it was banned. A whole-house strip-out is the single most disturbing activity a domestic building will ever experience, which is why the survey question belongs before the demolition quote rather than after it.

The legal position in an owner-occupied home is easy to misread. HSE says that in owner-occupied domestic properties the owners are not legally responsible for risks to contractors from asbestos, because the owners themselves are not engaged in any work activity. That is not the same as saying there is no duty anywhere. The contractor is engaged in a work activity, and the duties under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 fall on them. What it means in practice is that the homeowner's protection is commercial rather than statutory: agree in the contract who surveys, who removes, who disposes and who pays, because otherwise a mid-strip-out discovery becomes a mid-strip-out argument.

Disposal is not a detail. HSE notes that asbestos-containing materials must be legally disposed of as hazardous waste, must not be mixed with normal household waste, and that asbestos waste should only be handled by a licensed disposal site, with the local authority able to provide details. Homeowners are advised not to try to repair or remove asbestos materials themselves without training for non-licensed work, and can seek advice from an environmental health officer at their local council.

Most domestic renovations never cross the notification threshold, but a large whole-house project with several trades running at once occasionally does, and it is worth knowing where the line sits. Regulation 6 of CDM 2015 makes a project notifiable if the construction work on a construction site is scheduled either to last longer than 30 working days and have more than 20 workers working simultaneously at any point in the project, or to exceed 500 person days. Where a project is notifiable, notice in writing must be given to the Executive as soon as is practicable before the construction phase begins, and the notice has to be displayed in the site office in a comprehensible form where workers can read it, and updated if necessary.

On a domestic project that obligation travels with the rest of the client duties. HSE states that a domestic client's duties pass automatically to the contractor on a single contractor project, or to the principal contractor where there is more than one, or to a designer who has taken them on under a written agreement and thereby become principal designer. So the practical step for a homeowner is not to file the notice, but to ask who is responsible for deciding whether one is needed.

Separately, and regardless of notification, regulation 15 requires that where there is only one contractor on the project, that contractor must draw up a construction phase plan, or make arrangements for one to be drawn up, as soon as is practicable before setting up a construction site. A contractor who cannot say what their construction phase plan covers on a project of this size is telling you something useful.

The end of a whole-house project is a pile of paper as much as a finished house, and it is the pile a buyer's solicitor will interrogate years later. Assemble it as the work proceeds rather than trying to reconstruct it afterwards, when the electrician has changed company and the building control officer has retired.

Building control is devolved and the route changes with the border. GOV.UK's building regulations guidance covers England and Wales and states there are different rules in Scotland and Northern Ireland. A Scottish whole-house refurbishment goes through a building warrant from the council before work starts, with a completion certificate submitted afterwards. A Northern Irish one goes through district council building control under the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012.

VAT, by contrast, is a UK-wide tax, so the 5% reduced rate for a dwelling that has not been lived in for two years applies to an empty house in Aberdeen or Armagh on the same terms as one in Manchester. Note the HMRC condition that bites in every nation: where work requires statutory planning consent or statutory building control and it has not been granted, the work is standard-rated. Getting the consent right is not only a compliance question.