What are the most common renovation regrets?

Under-budgeting is the renovation regret we hear most often, usually paired with its cause: taking the cheapest quote. A low quote is nearly always low because something has been left out. Waste, making good, decoration, moving a soil pipe that turns out to be in the wrong place. The extras arrive one by one and the final bill lands well above the number that won the job. It is why we survey first and then give a fixed written quote. The price we quote is the price you pay.

The second regret is under-specifying the boring things. Too few sockets, no storage, one ceiling light doing all the work. These are cheap to add during the build and painful to retrofit once the walls are closed up. On bathroom refits people skimp on storage most, then live with bottles on the floor. A full bathroom refit starts from £7,000 and a refresh from £4,500, and getting the spec right within that budget beats stretching to a bigger job done thinly.

The third is over-personalising. Strong trend choices, coloured suites and heavily patterned feature walls read as dated fast and cost you at resale. We see it constantly in ex-rental flats in Balham and Clapham: bold fit-outs from five years ago that new owners pay us to strip out. Put the personality in paint and fittings you can change, not in the tiles and sanitaryware you cannot.