What are the types of renovations?

There are three types of renovation by scope: light, medium and full, which most builders call a gut renovation. Light work is finishes: painting, new flooring, swapping tired taps and fittings, patching plaster. Medium adds new kitchens and bathrooms, partial rewiring or pipework, and small layout changes such as taking down a stud wall. Full means stripping the house back to brick and joists, then rebuilding everything inside: complete rewire, replumb, replaster, new heating, usually insulation and a reworked floor plan while everything is open.

The right scope depends on what the building is hiding, not what it looks like. We renovate a lot of Victorian terraces around Crystal Palace and Sydenham where the owner budgets for a light refresh, then the survey turns up 1970s wiring and dead lead pipework. Painting over that is money wasted. Ex-rental flats usually land in the middle: sound structure, hammered finishes, kitchens and bathrooms past saving. A house that has sat untouched for forty years is nearly always a full job, and doing it in one hit costs less than three separate rounds of trades over a decade.

For budgeting, a whole-house renovation starts from £1,200 per square metre. Light and medium projects vary too much for one headline figure, so we survey first and give a fixed written quote. The price we quote is the price you pay. And scope is not quality. A light renovation done well beats a full one done on the cheap.