The kitchen is in. The walls are painted. And now someone needs to lift the new floor to run a cable that should have gone in six weeks ago.
Most refurb stress isn’t caused by bad work. It’s caused by good work done in the wrong order, then undone and paid for twice. Sequence is the cheapest thing you can get right.
Start with the building itself, not the look of it
Before anyone talks about colours or worktops, the building needs to be dry and sound. That means the roof, the gutters and downpipes, any damp, and the windows and external doors.
Decorating into an active leak is the classic and most expensive mistake. Damp doesn’t stay hidden under fresh plaster and paint — it comes back through, on its own timetable, usually just after the scaffolding has gone.
Get a survey done up front so you know what you’re actually buying into. In a pre-2000 property that includes a refurbishment and demolition asbestos survey before anything gets drilled, cut or ripped out. It’s far easier to plan around asbestos than to discover it with the walls already open and the trades booked.
Then structure and layout
Once the envelope is sound, deal with anything that changes the shape of the place: walls and openings, new steels, floor structure, staircases.
Two things to sort before anyone picks up a hammer. Structural work — removing or altering a load-bearing wall, putting in a steel, changing openings — needs Building Regulations approval and usually a structural engineer’s calculations, so build the sign-off into your programme. And if you share a wall with a neighbour, which most terraces and semis do, work to that wall normally means serving notice under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, typically at least two months ahead. Rules and timescales change, so check the current position or take advice.
This is also where you settle the layout properly — where the kitchen goes, which way the bathroom faces, where the doors swing. Every decision after this point depends on those answers.
First fix: everything that lives inside the walls
First fix is the electrics and plumbing that get buried — cables, back boxes, pipework, waste runs, underfloor heating, plus any new drainage.
To do first fix properly, the trades need to know where things end up. Which wall the TV sits on. Whether the hob is induction or gas. Where the towel rail goes and how high. Whether you want a socket by the bed on each side.
Changing your mind after first fix is the other great budget-killer. Moving a socket once the plaster is on doesn’t mean moving a socket; it means chasing walls, replastering, redecorating and doing it all again.
Plaster, then let it dry
Plastering is a clean line in the middle of a project. Before it, everything is rough and open. After it, the building starts to look like a home.
It also needs time. Fresh plaster has to dry properly before it takes paint, and rushing that is how you end up with patchy walls and a decorator’s bill twice over.
Second fix: the things you can see
Second fix is sockets and switches, radiators, sanitaryware, taps, doors and architraves, skirtings, and the kitchen going in.
Order the big items early, even if they’re stored for weeks. Kitchens, bathroom suites and made-to-measure pieces all run on lead times, and a project can sit idle waiting for one delivery.
One small rule that saves a lot of grief: don’t tile until the fittings are chosen and, ideally, on site. Tiling around a bath, a shower tray or a worktop you haven’t bought yet is a guess, and guesses get cut out again.
Decoration, then flooring, then the finishing touches
Paint before the floor goes down, not after. Anything else means masking, drips and a lot of anxious tiptoeing.
Flooring comes late for the same reason: it’s the surface most easily damaged, and everything above it should be finished by the time it arrives.
Finishing touches — handles, blinds, shelving, light fittings, mirrors, the snagging list — come last, and they’re the part people enjoy. Leave enough energy and enough budget to do them properly, because they’re what the room actually looks like day to day.
The practical stuff that keeps it calm
The sequence matters, but so does everything around it:
- Set a realistic budget and add a contingency. Older properties nearly always have a surprise in them somewhere, and a contingency turns a crisis into an inconvenience.
- Get scope agreed in writing — what’s included, what isn’t, what happens if something unexpected turns up behind a wall.
- Think about access. Parking, skip placement, where materials get stored, how trades get in when you’re at work.
- Plan for dust. It travels much further than anyone expects, and sealing off the rooms you’re still using is worth the effort.
- Decide where you’ll live. Staying put through a full kitchen or bathroom refit is doable, but only if you’ve planned washing up and showering somewhere.
- Be realistic about timescales. Drying times, lead times and inspections don’t compress just because you’d like them to.
The three mistakes we see most
Decorating before the damp is fixed. Tiling before the fittings are chosen. Changing your mind after first fix.
All three feel harmless at the time. All three mean paying for the same work twice, and each one pushes the finish date further out than the original job ever would have.
If you’re planning work this year
Send us a few photos through our Get a quote page and tell us roughly what you have in mind. We’ll give you a straight view of the order it should be done in and a quick quote — no pressure either way.
