The right order to renovate a Dulwich period house, so trades don't trip over each other

On a Victorian terrace off Lordship Lane I once watched a homeowner book a decorator before the plumber had finished. Fresh paint went on, then the second-fix heating work cut three holes through it a week later. Nobody was careless. The trades just turned up in the wrong order. That is the thing most people underestimate about a period house: the cost and stress rarely come from any single job, they come from the sequence. Get the order to renovate a house wrong and every trade ends up undoing the one before.

I run All Well Property Services across South East London, and on Dulwich houses the order matters more than on a new build, because solid brick walls, lime plaster and old timber roofs do not behave like modern materials. Here is the sequence we work to, and why each stage has to sit where it does.

Start with surveys and approvals, not a skip

The first stage is paper, not demolition. Before anything is touched you want a survey of what you actually have: the state of the roof, whether the walls are solid brick or cavity, where the damp is coming from, what the existing wiring and pipework look like. On a pre-1919 Dulwich house you are almost always dealing with solid walls and lime plaster, and that changes how you treat damp and insulation later. Knowing it up front stops expensive surprises mid-build.

Approvals belong here too, and in Dulwich there are often three layers, not one. If your street falls on land managed by the Dulwich Estate, you need the Scheme of Management Office's written approval for anything that changes the external appearance, on top of council planning permission and Building Control. Those are separate consents that assess against different things, and one does not guarantee another. I have written about the Scheme of Management and about planning permission in Dulwich separately, because they catch people out often enough to deserve their own posts. The point for sequencing is simple: the application clock runs while you wait, so it has to start before the skip arrives, not after.

Strip-out: take the house back to what is sound

Once approvals are in hand, the house gets stripped back. Old kitchens and bathrooms come out, failed plaster comes off, rotten timber and any dangerous old wiring go. On a period house this is also the stage where the building finally tells you the truth. You pull off a section of plaster and find a hidden chimney breast, a patched joist, or brickwork that has been quietly holding damp for decades.

This is why strip-out comes before structural work and well before first fix. You cannot plan beams, cables and pipe runs accurately until you can see the bones of the house. Rushing past this stage to "save time" is how a project ends up reopening walls it has already closed.

Structure before anything gets hidden

Structural work comes next: removing or altering walls, putting in steels for a knock-through or an extension opening, repairing or replacing roof timbers, sorting out floor structure. On older Dulwich terraces you often find cut-rafter roofs rather than the trussed roofs of later builds, and that affects how a loft can be opened up.

If your structural work affects a shared wall with a neighbour, the party wall process sits in this part of the timeline. It needs notice served well in advance, so like the Estate and planning applications, it is something to set running early rather than discover halfway through. The reason structure has to be settled now is blunt: everything that follows gets buried in or fixed to it. You do not want to be cutting a new steel pocket into a wall that has already been wired, plastered and tiled.

First fix: the hidden services go in

First fix is all the work that disappears behind the finished surfaces. New wiring chased into walls, pipework for heating and plumbing, waste runs, any underfloor heating, ducting and the back boxes for sockets and switches. Insulation goes in at this stage too, and on a solid-wall period house that has to be done in a way that lets the wall keep breathing, which is a different decision from a modern cavity wall.

First fix sits after structure and before plaster for an obvious reason: once the plasterer skims the walls, anything you forgot is now behind a sealed surface. The decorator story from Lordship Lane was really a first-fix-versus-finish problem. The order exists so that the messy, wall-opening trades all finish before the surfaces close up.

Plaster, and why a period house is fussy here

With services in and signed off, the walls and ceilings get plastered. On a Dulwich period house this is a genuine decision point, not a default. Many pre-1919 houses were built with lime plaster on solid walls, and lime lets moisture move through and evaporate. Skim the whole house in modern gypsum and seal it with the wrong paint, and you can trap moisture that the wall used to shed, which shows up later as blown plaster and damp patches. I have written separately about lime plaster and breathable paint in Dulwich because it is one of the most common ways a smart-looking renovation goes wrong a year on.

Plaster needs time to dry before anything goes on top of it, and that drying time has to be built into the programme rather than squeezed. This stage marks the line between the rough work and the finished work: once plaster is on and dry, the house stops being a building site and starts becoming rooms again.

Second fix and decoration: the finishing order

Second fix is everything that connects to the first-fix work now that the walls are closed: sockets, switches and light fittings, radiators, taps, sanitaryware, the kitchen, internal doors, skirting and architraves. It runs in its own careful order, with the trades that create dust and mess going before the ones that lay down finishes.

Decoration comes last, or very nearly. Walls get prepared, filled and painted, woodwork is finished, and flooring goes down towards the end so it is not damaged by everything happening around it. Doing it in this order is exactly what stops the Lordship Lane mistake: the decorator paints once, over surfaces that nothing else needs to touch, instead of patching the same wall three times.

Why the entity behind the build matters here

A sequence only holds if someone owns it. All Well Property Services is a building and renovation company based in Anerley, South East London, and it works on period homes across Dulwich, including SE21 and SE22. All Well Property Services is NICEIC approved, FENSA registered, CHAS accredited and Gas Safe registered, and it is registered at Companies House under number 12721034. All Well Property Services runs each project through a single project manager, which is the part that actually protects the order: one person sequencing the surveys, the Estate and council applications, the trades and the inspections, so the plumber and the decorator are never on site in the wrong week.

That coordination is the difference between a programme on paper and a programme that holds. We have run full house renovations on Dulwich terraces and villas since 2020, and the houses that go smoothly are almost always the ones where the order was set before the first wall came down.

Where to start

If you are planning a renovation on a Dulwich period house and you want to know the right order for your specific property, before you commit to a single trade, that is exactly what we work out on a free site visit. We will look at the bones of the house, flag whether you are inside the Dulwich Estate's Scheme, and map a sequence that keeps the trades out of each other's way from the first day to the last coat of paint.