Guide
Refurbishment costs, room by room
Every appraisal on this site costs the work by room, at a light or a heavy level, then adds the professional fees and a contingency. These are the rates it uses. They are a starting point you can argue with line by line, not a quote.
Published 5 September 2026 · Updated 5 September 2026
Two reasons. Listings reliably carry a bedroom count and rarely a floor area, so a schedule built on rooms runs where a pound-per-square-foot figure cannot. And a schedule gives you lines to argue with. A kitchen figure you think is low is a figure you can correct; a single total is only something to accept or reject.
Light is decorating, flooring, a tidy-up of the kitchen and bathroom, the things a tired but sound house needs to let or sell. Heavy is the kitchen and bathroom out and replaced, walls and services touched, the kind of work that wants an architect and a structural engineer looking at it.
| Room | Light | Heavy |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen | £5,000 | £18,000 |
| Bathroom | £5,000 | £12,000 |
| Living room | £5,000 | £8,000 |
| Dining room | £2,000 | £6,000 |
| Each bedroom | £2,000 | £5,000 |
Bedrooms from the listing's count; the rest as one of each.
Professional fees are lines of the same schedule, and legal fees are one of those lines rather than a separate cost, which is how they end up counted twice. Heavier work brings in the professionals heavier work needs.
Professional fees
| Fee | Light | Heavy |
|---|---|---|
| Surveyor | £750 | £750 |
| Legal fees | £2,000 | £2,000 |
| Architect | — | £3,000 |
| Structural engineer | — | £1,500 |
Contingency
10% of the refurbishment and the fees together, by default. It covers what a survey or an opened wall turns up, and it is never zero: a refurbishment appraisal without one is optimistic to the point of being misleading.
It does not apply to stamp duty or bridging. Those are known exactly once the price is known, and padding them would overstate the cost.
A kitchen, one bathroom, a living room, a dining room and three bedrooms.
Light
| Rooms: 5,000 + 5,000 + 5,000 + 2,000 + 3 × 2,000 | £23,000 |
| Fees: surveyor and legal | £2,750 |
| Contingency at 10% | £2,575 |
| Cost of the work | £28,325 |
Heavy
| Rooms: 18,000 + 12,000 + 8,000 + 6,000 + 3 × 5,000 | £59,000 |
| Fees: surveyor, architect, engineer, legal | £7,250 |
| Contingency at 10% | £6,625 |
| Cost of the work | £72,875 |
You do. The search runs at light by default and can be set to heavy under "More options"; every property page lets you change it and watches every figure move. The site reads the listing to say whether a property needs work at all, from the agent's words and the photographs, and it shows you what it read that from — but how much work is a judgement, and it is yours. Get real quotes before you commit.