What is the difference between renovate and redecorate?

Renovating replaces or upgrades parts of the building; redecorating changes the surfaces. Paint, wallpaper, new carpet or curtains is redecoration. A new bathroom, a rewire, a moved wall or a new kitchen is renovation. The line is roughly whether a skip and building control get involved.

Disruption is the other real difference. You can live normally through redecoration, moving room to room ahead of the decorator. A renovation takes each room out of action for weeks, and a whole-house job may mean moving out. Plenty of the ex-rental flats we take on in Lewisham and Beckenham have been redecorated between every tenancy for twenty years, and the paint has been hiding tired wiring and damp the whole time. Redecoration freshens a house. It never fixes one.

On cost, decorating a single room starts from £400 and repainting a full three-bed house from £4,000. Renovation is a different scale: whole-house work starts from £1,200 per square metre. Either way we survey first and give a fixed written quote, so the price we quote is the price you pay. If you are not sure which your property needs, an honest builder should tell you when redecoration is enough. Sometimes it is.