If you ignore house price rises and falls you can make money on property renovation if you do the majority of the work yourself. We bought a run down two bed “Maison de Maitre” with an acre of land for 183K in 2011, spent 120K and transformed it into a stunning four bed, five bathroom “mini chateau” which sold for 460K in 2023, I did 90% of the work which saved us tens of 0000’s in labour costs, I also sourced most of the materials and fittings thereby cutting out the “mark up” that trades add on if they supply anything.
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This and all input here is excellent advice!
When we came to buy in France, admittedly somewhat affected by having read the Year in Provence series (which incidentally had already made Peter Mayle millions and perhaps an equal amount of indignant critics), we were adamant about not undertaking a ‘project’. We knowingly paid over the price for a house that already had all the build components we need and only required decorative internal changes.
This has proved invaluable as we have irascible neighbours who would have stymied much of these modernisations had the previous owner not been the privileged sole village doctor.
From professional experience I would always say whatever your renovation plan is estimated to cost, ensure you have funds and time for it to double.
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So you set no value on your time doing the work? Also needs a certain competence!
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I think that could be the exception rather than the rule Tim. We bought our run down over 20y ago and like you I have done most of the work myself. New roof, insulation mainly upstairs, re wire, add a pool and extra storage rooms etc but was shocked to see the prices suggested on the site I mentioned on the other thread, taking into consideration the mortgage payments we wont break even.
You shouldn’t think like that, a lot of things that you do yourself as a matter of routine could be done by someone else which you’d have to pay for - gardening, basic DIY, completing a tax return etc.
It does but not hard to learn if you have the confidence.
@SuePJ I was a Realtor in the US before I retired and moved to France. When I was showing property, I always had to mask my lack of enthusiasm for two basins in the bathroom, as everyone else seemed to think that it was such a benefit. Personally I’m with you.
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Did you have any issues with décennale insurance at the time of sale or was all of the work more than 10 years prior?
Yes but most can’t or won’t especially on holiday homes hence why we never ran out of work contracts and with our charges including TVA, there is no way the clients would ever recoup that money spent. Doing work yourself is fine but sometimes the Deçenelle can be demanded if the work under ten years old and we often had to supply a copy for the immobilier or the notaire so the purchaser is protected.
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When we first started to look to buy here we rejected just about every single DIY renovation job as they were so botched - no matter the nationality of the person.
Our current house was owner renovated, but he happens to be a proper maçon so seemed done well. Several years down the line we did discover he’d used wrong cable to lights over kitchen worksurface when we forgot to turn them off and came home to scorched smell and found them melted.
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Thanks to @Badger I replaced the cables running down the garden years ago after I used the incorrect std of cable, I seriously doubt the perfect home exists unless its literally brand new and built to passiv house standards as that construction has pretty much re written how we should be building. On an old building its much harder to adapt it and thats where short cuts are taken and mistakes made. I try to do my best but back in the UK house I am now re doing somethings with a much clearer idea thanks to many low carbon and researched ways of improving old housing stock. The cost implications of using some green materials cannot be overstated so everything has to come with budget contraints as many green materials are 5-6 times the price of others.
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I think you need to be a certain sort of person to renovate a house as a matter of routine.
As long as my health holds out I will never pay anyone for gardening, basic DIY or completing a tax return (unless my affairs suddenly become complicated). But spending years of my life constantly thinking about and working on a major renovation project, sourcing materials, checking building regs, problem solving, dealing with the red tape, learning new skills I do not particularly want - never. I would look back on those years as “lost”.
But I am impressed and you must feel proud of an achievement like that. How did you turn two bedrooms into four bedrooms and five bathrooms, and I have to ask, what is the logic of having more bathrooms than bedrooms?
If you put two basins in each bathroom, that would make 10 basins so you would probably get a discount for bulk buying. But I think my wife would tell me that if I put in 10 basins, do not expect her to clean them all.
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I have one bathroom with only one basin in it. Even when my house is full of visitors it has never been a problem. Despite my low living standards my house is worth more than the sum of the money I bought it for plus the investment I made renovating it but not in the way that a U.K. house will have increased in the same way. In thirty years the house I own plus about €100,000 of improvements has gained possibly £50,000. In the same time a house I once owned in Cornwall with a similar amount of investment gained £500,000. Unfortunately for me I sold it before it was improved and someone else pocketed the profit.
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As an aside, I for one am glad that rampant house price inflation is not (generally) a thing in France!
I have a fairly meagre budget and am not likely to be able to move to France from the UK until 2027ish, so it’s important that my budget isn’t eroded by price rises as it would be in the UK.
(I will be relying on an inheritance to fund the purchase so I’m not “benefitting” from UK house price inflation currently).
As for renovating, I am full of admiration for those that do it, but my limit is painting walls and putting up a shelf or two!
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That will work up to a point. When we did our renovation I was the one who dealt with our project manager, who spoke no English. We sort of muddled through. There were moments however when only my husband (or the mention of my husband) would do. Elderly artisans in rural France can be very chauvinistic.
For example, our electrician was a dour individual. One day he called me into the bathroom where he was working and informed me that the electrics in the bathroom could never have worked. I assured him they had, but he refused to accept my answer. He immediately brightened up when I told him I would ask my husband. (The wiring had been done by Brits many years previously and they’d just taken a loop off a local power point, so there was nothing going back to the fuse box, much to the horror of our French electrician.)
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It’s one of the things I really enjoy about living in France, I like my house being my home and nothing more. I worked in East Sussex for a year in the 1980s and in the small village where I was every house sported a for sale sign as they were bought for investment not because it was a nice place to live. It was actually a lovely place to live but the lack of stability had already killed off the feeling of the village being a community.
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Absolutely. Everything we have done to our house has been for us. And after 20 years we tend to view it as an annual happiness price that we have benefited from.
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Not easy to explain, the house was basically a “two up, two down” with a central hall and staircase dividing the two living rooms and two bedrooms. Attached to the house were identically sized additional buildings at each end, one was used as a cattle shed/hay store whilst the other had the kitchen on the ground floor but nothing above. I converted the cattle shed etc into a study downstairs with a bedroom above accessed by a new staircase, the space above the kitchen was turned into a bedroom with another new staircase.
Both existing bedrooms were huge so I pinched a third of each to create four ensuite shower rooms and knocked through the two end walls for access. At the back of the house was a large utility type room which housed the only toilet, this was converted into another shower room/utility.
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One of my friends did a similar thing without any problem. When he bought the large maison de maitre it had only two bedrooms both on the ground floor. There was a staircase leading upstairs to a huge upstairs with the same footprint as the ground floor and enough headroom for tall ceilings and an attic space. He did away with the ground floor ‘bedrooms’ and built four large double bedrooms and at least two bathrooms. My house when I bought it was all on one level with no obvious bedrooms and now has four bedrooms upstairs. Finding space for extra bedrooms in a lot of older French property is not hard.
Since my wife speaks French, that requirement is already covered.
Could you clarify what you meant by the profit comment? Is it mainly related to taxes, fees, or charges, or are there other reasons behind it?
@chris_jordan you seem to be echoing the post made by @Kendal5 11 months ago.. and, as far as I can see, the answer to both of you is already within/higher up the thread.
take a butchers…
best of luck
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