Solo Renovating My First House: How I Did It and What I Learned

Between 2019 and 2023, I solo-renovated a 1970s ex-council house while working full-time. It was chaotic, exhausting, and taught me more about problem-solving than any course ever could. The confidence I built, and the financial security the project generated, eventually gave me the freedom to take the leap into becoming a web developer, so it felt appropriate that my first blog should be about this massive project.

This is what happens when you dive into a complex project with no real plan - and why sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do.

About the House

In 2019, I bought my first house - a 1970s, timber-frame construction, ex-council, vacant repossession in Birmingham that quite literally stunk of pee. From outside it looked merely run-down, inside was far less pleasant.

The moment you opened the front door, the smell hit you. Large stains spread across the flooring. Walls were covered in dark grey paint clearly hiding something worse. The previous owner had fallen into ill health, and neighbours confirmed the house had been severely neglected.

Beyond the smell: non-functioning boiler, stripped out kitchen with walls coated in grease (no extractor fan and years of frying, presumably), old plumbing, rotten decking, original 1970s wiring, tiny bathroom and toilet and less-than-ideal internal layout, to name just a few issues.

So why did I buy this mess of a house? Well, it was cheap. And with my experience and what I knew I could do, I knew I could transform it into something great.

Saying that, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

My assessment: Strip everything and rebuild it all properly.

My plan: Figure it out as I go.

From the original estate agents photos - the outside looks okay but the real horrors lay inside!

The kitchen was in an awful state and when there was no extractor fan, which meant the walls were coated with a thick layer of grease.

I could see that the kitchen diner did have potential. Those two cupboards on the left needed to go to open up the space. One contained an old floor-standing boiler which was not working.

Another view of the kitchen diner. Grubby, but lots of potential to be a great room.

It might not look it but the living room was one of the better rooms in the house!

The second bedroom. I always liked the wallpaper here!

The third bedroom or box-room would later become my office.

The toilet was separate to the bathroom (not pictured). I would go on to join these two rooms into a family bathroom.

A sloped garden with a rotting deck. I guess the flowers were nice though!

Why I Thought I Could Do This

My Dad was a self-employed carpenter and builder. I’d worked with him from childhood through my mid-twenties on full renovations, extensions, kitchens, bathrooms. He taught me so much over the years that I was confident that I knew how to do the individual tasks.

I call this a solo project but my Dad was a huge help and I don’t think I would have taken it on if I didn’t have his guidance. I could rely on him when I didn’t know how to do something and he often came down to help out with the trickier projects or when one person wasn’t enough.

What I didn’t know: how to plan and manage a complex project systematically. I was about to learn that lesson the hard way.

The Renovation: From Chaos to Comfort

The First Three Months: Removal of Walls and Floors

On day one, I started knocking down walls to open up the wasted space in the kitchen-diner. A cupboard that housed an old standing boiler needed to be removed along with another two large cupboards downstairs and one on the landing that housed a large water tank from the old plumbing system.

All of the upstairs floors had to be removed and replaced as they was saturated in something foul! My attempts at odour neutralisation had only sought to make things worse with a strong lemon chemical smell now fighting for dominance over something even worse.

With all of the internal floors removed it gave me an opportunity to have a really good look at the layout upstairs. I chose to remove all of the internal walls in order to maximise space. It also gave me a chance to strengthen them with chipboard sheets, and run pipes, electrical and networking cables through them.

From day one I got stuck into removing walls and opening up the floor plan

Fresh tongue-and-groove chipboard was screwed and glued into place to completely replace the contaminated upstairs flooring

Months 3-6: Home Comforts?

At this stage, I was already living in the house. Leaving work, commuting back to the house, and starting work again in the evenings. I had bought a second-hand sofa for free from Freecycle and that was where I slept for a few weeks. I was determined to spend every hour I could on the house until I got the place liveable.

I needed a working bathroom so that became one of the first and most important projects. I had already knocked the previous small bathroom and toilet into one room but in order to finish, I needed to reroute the soil pipe outside so I had to dig up the garden. By adding a splitter to the soil pipe it meant that I could come back later and join up another toilet for a downstairs toilet.

By now, the weather was getting cold and I didn’t have any heating (nor did I have much money!) so I found a used combi boiler, also on Gumtree (thanks Gumtree) for £60, with the seller’s assurance that ‘it worked when they removed it’.

A new boiler would have cost me thousands so I thought it was worth the gamble!

I installed a loft ladder and mounted the boiler in the loft to maximise space downstairs. it also meant that the flue could go straight out through the roof and pipes could be run down through a little partition I made on the landing, making them nice and centralised for running radiator pipes to all of the rooms.

Amazingly, after a lot of pipework and a bit of a struggle to make new valves for the unit, the boiler fired up without issues! I have to give the credit to my Dad for the work on getting the boiler working. His experience and persistence were really valuable that day!

The rest of this period saw the upstairs transform quickly. Plaster boarding, a ton of plastering, fitting door frames, doors, architrave and flooring. Plus wiring, lighting, networking cables, fitting radiators, and by the time the Spring of 2020 was rolling around, I finally had a couple of nice rooms to use.

This little partition on the landing in the centre of the house was the perfect place to bring the main feed to and from the boiler (the copper pipe is the gas feed)

You can just make out in this picture where I’ve moved walls and altered the bulkhead over the stairs to open up more space in the box room. The ceiling has been over-boarded and plastering has begun but the ‘tool chaos’ you see was an ongoing issue!

I needed to dig up the garden to lay new soil pipe. You can see here where I added a junction for the downstairs toilet before reburying the pipe. A year or so later, I would excavate it again in order to connect up the downstairs toilet.

All new bathroom - one of the first and most important jobs!

Months 6-12: Unnecessary but ‘Fun’ Additions

Now that upstairs was functional and the weather was improving, it meant that I could start to focus my attention on downstairs - which gave me an opportunity to have a little fun.

In order to get through this mammoth project, I wanted to do something unusual, something that I would enjoy experimenting with. Things which now seem (particularly as I have now sold the house) largely unnecessary but were some of the most fun parts of the build and added features that separated this house from the others and dare I say it, made it unique and special. Those include:

Reinforcing the first floor with 2 x 4 cross beams salvaged from the removed partitions throughout the house.

The purpose was to strengthen, and take the ‘spring’ out of the first floor that, in my opinion, made the house feel a bit… cheap. It worked brilliantly, but it was an incredible amount of work and I doubt most people would even appreciate it. But I did! So I guess spending hours upon hours sat in the kitchen (then just a stripped room with a couple of old cupboards and a large bucket!) de-nailing countless timbers before measuring, cutting and gluing them all into place in the ceiling, was totally worth it. Probably.

Extensive soundproofing with 50mm Rockwool batts installed both in the ceilings between the ground and first floor, as well as in all of the partition walls downstairs.

The purpose here was to reduce noise between both upstairs and downstairs (the shower and flush of the toilet being particularly loud in the kitchen below) but also between the living room, kitchen and other rooms of the house in order to isolate them from one another. So, if someone wants to watch a film in the living room, it needn’t disturb someone having a quiet conversation in the kitchen or those upstairs trying to sleep.

I also added OSB sheets to the internal walls both to help in sound transfer between rooms but also to give me something to fix to if I wanted to hang anything off the walls. In hindsight, I think this was mostly unnecessary and it made fitting sockets into the walls much more difficult later on.

All in all, it was a nice addition and gave the house much more of a higher-end, cozy feel. It also meant that I could do something I really wanted to experiment with, which was definitely my most unnecessary addition (but also my favourite)…

Custom built speaker enclosures and speakers installed in the ceilings

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, completely unnecessary. But, what fun!

I built custom speaker enclosures from 18mm MDF and installed two large speakers in the living room ceiling in stereo configuration and two more in the kitchen-diner (both in mono, one above the kitchen section, the other over the dining table), with another small one (also mono) on the upstairs landing.

They all had speaker cables leading back to a speaker terminal behind the TV where a Denon AVR (Audio Visual Receiver) connected to my TV and music devices allowed me to send audio all throughout the house, or contain it to sections, depending on what I was doing.

When I had guests over and we could move through the house with no loss in volume or quality if we were listening to music. Or, if I was listening to a podcast, I could have it playing throughout the house while I worked and not have to worry about snagging my headphone cable on my knee every time I knelt down! (I had not yet discovered the wonders of wireless headphones)

Here you can see the custom speaker enclosures and the audio cables leading out of them to the terminal (not shown). You can also see the cross-bracing I added to the flooring above using reclaimed 2x4s.

50 mm Rockwool insulation and OSB sheets added to all internal walls significantly reduced sound transfer throughout the house.

Me terminating wires: The section behind the TV needed terminals for two coax cables (satellite and internet), two ethernet cables, ten speaker cables as well as three double sockets!

Another view from the kitchen showing a speaker enclosure now surrounded by sound insulation. The holes to install the speaker would be cut after being over-boarded with plasterboard and required careful measure in order to find once it had been covered up.

Year Two: ‘…When a Plan Comes Together’

This balustrade as well as the bannister down the stairs was a big upgrade from the plain council one that preceded it.

The effort I made to open up the kitchen added lots more space and I’m proud of the work I did here.

I cut through the outside wall into what was originally a bit of a shed. A fully insulated concrete floor was raised to the height of the kitchen which allowed for a seamless transition from the kitchen-diner.

They say a nice front door can add £5,000 to the value of the house. This door I bought second-hand from Facebook Marketplace for £70 - so, I’d say that’s a good return on investment!

With most of the inside work completed, the biggest job in year two was to tackle the front porch. It was an old, cold, single-brick, garden-shed-like building tacked onto the front of the house which would have simply been somewhere to store bins when the house was first built. But I wanted to make a feature out of it!

In order to transform the porch into what I wanted, I added 50mm of insulation to the walls and ceiling, a new front door, plasterboarded and plastered, added lighting, sockets, ran a waterline to a tap outside (handy for washing the car!), new fascia and guttering and one of my favourite additions to the house: a nice new south-facing window which allowed light to flow into the house, making the house lovely and bright. First impressions of the house were hugely improved.

The pace of work would slow somewhat during the following year as life had to regain some normality but on top of the porch project, I still managed a great deal done:

Year Three

In year three, one huge job loomed over me - the installation of a new driveway. It was something I had never done before and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

At least with all of the other jobs in the house, I knew (to some extent) what I was doing, but to install a new driveway with no experience was daunting!

The job involved digging up the huge concrete paving grids, digging out the driveway to an appropriate depth and installing layers of compacted stone, sand and finishing with concrete paving stones.

The new driveway transformed the look of the front of the house and although it was expensive, difficult, and I was dreading doing it, it was one of the best financial decisions when it came to adding resale value to the house.

I gave those concrete grids away for free online and they were gratefully received by a man who needed something like that to build a driveway/jetty for launching his boat.

I dug up the old patio and broke up the slabs with a sledgehammer to use as hardcore under the front drive. I would later lay new paving here when renovating the garden.

This was one of those lessons in ‘you can put anything you put your mind to’. I was really proud of the work me and my Dad accomplished here.

The Difficult Final Decision

At this point I had come a long way and I was starting to really enjoy the house that I had created for myself but a different type of chaos had returned to the house.

Unfortunately, a change in the immediate living environment outside of my control made that unrealistic. New neighbours brought persistent noise, boundary issues, and ongoing disruption.

After years of work, that was hard to accept. The house stopped feeling like a place to rest or reset and was starting to feel restrictive and stressful.

At the same time, I was beginning to reassess what I wanted next. When the opportunity arose to apply for a place on a respected coding bootcamp. the timing aligned in a way I hadn’t expected. I had been learning to code in my spare time for a while already and selling the house gave me the financial and mental space to take that risk to do something I loved.

So, I decided to sell and once again, jumped back into top gear to finish some remaining jobs to get the house ready to sell:

In order to level this very sloped garden, I built a retaining wall with soakaway to a nearby drain and dug a lot of the dirt from the rear, higher part of the garden and moved it to the lower, front section.

A view from the roof after pointing the ridge tiles and scraping the moss off the rest of the tiles.

The Results: Selling My Biggest Project To-Date

The house went up for sale and it wasn’t long before I had 3 offers, each one at or just below my asking price. I had raised the value of the house by £87,500 or 74.47%!

Selling the house brought the project to a clear end, even if it wasn’t the one I’d originally planned. The financial result softened the blow.

More importantly, it gave me confidence that I could take on complex, unfamiliar work and see it through to completion. That confidence turned out to matter far more than the bricks and mortar - because it made the next chapter possible.

Final Estate Agent Photos: Front

Final Estate Agent Photos: Kitchen-diner

Final Estate Agent Photos: Living room

Final Estate Agent Photos: Office

Final Estate Agent Photos: Second bedroom (or my gym)

Final Estate Agent Photos: Main bedroom

Final Estate Agent Photos: Rear garden

The Technical Scope

Over 3.5 years and ~3,000 hours of work while employed full-time, here's everything I actually did (yes, I documented it all for Building Control):

Core Systems:

Major Structural Changes:

Complete Interior:

Exterior:

All certified and compliant with Building Control.

What Went Wrong (And What I Learned)

The Problems

Constant context-switching: Because everything was going on all at once, I might be doing electrics, plumbing, carpentry, etc., all in the same day. It was an inefficient way to work.

Late dependency discoveries: “I’ll just plaster this wall— oh wait, I need to run that cable first. Now I need to cut out the plaster.”

Rework: Without a solid plan, and as I was discovering what I needed in a home, it meant that I sometimes went back over work that I had done. For example, I think I changed both my bathroom and kitchen lights twice (changing out many spotlights in favour of a single light source).

Tool chaos: Without workflow planning, tools were scattered everywhere. Hours wasted searching. I swear measuring tapes are like guitar picks - you leave them down and turn your back and some invisible goblin has nicked it, never to be seen again.

The Lessons

1. Sometimes chaos is necessary: That house was so compromised that incremental improvement wouldn’t work. I had to tear it apart completely. Like refactoring - sometimes you can’t keep the system running while you rebuild.

2. You learn by solving real problems: No course could have prepared me for every issue I encountered. Getting stuck in and solving problems as they arose taught me systematic problem-solving. Often, you don’t know what the results will be before you finish a job and realise it’s not what you wanted. This is something that only comes from experience.

3. Hidden dependencies are everywhere: That soil pipe inside the wall? The cross-bracing needed when removing load-bearing walls? You don't discover these until you dig in.

4. Quality compounds: I could have left that soil pipe, kept the bathroom separate, skipped the ethernet terminals, skipped the speaker system, skipped reinforcing the floor. But I’d be living with those compromises for as long as I owned the home and while they may have taken time from doing something ‘more important’, I believe these features helped elevate the house and made it easier to sell.

5. Documentation saves future-you: I took many photos of cables and plumbing before closing walls. I also created carefully measured diagrams to tell me where I could find things later. Invaluable when I needed to know where cables or pipes ran, or exactly where to drill the ceiling out when installing speakers. Plus, all the photos I took were invaluable when I had to create a ‘scope of works’ document to prove all the work that I did when it came to selling. A little forethought went a long way!

6. Thank God for Dads: My Dad was my rock and my cheerleader throughout this project and without him, I wouldn’t have had the skills or the confidence to complete the project. I’m eternally grateful to him for everything.

The Skills This Built

This project taught me things that directly translate to software development:

Systems thinking: Everything in a house connects. Change the bathroom layout, and you’re affecting plumbing, electrical, structural support, etc.

Debugging complex problems: Because I had stripped everything back to bare walls and started fresh and I knew exactly where all of my cables, piping, etc. was, debugging issues was so much easier. So, when one day a leak started in the kitchen ceiling, I knew exactly where to cut to get at the exact fitting which was causing the problem.

Reading technical documentation: At first I got stuck in without reading much of anything. My experience on houses carried me through most of the job. But it was when I did unfamiliar things like setting up the networking or sound system, that I had to learn the right methods so that I got the most out of these new systems. If you don’t know how to do something, chances are that someone has already done it and documented it online - the internet is your friend and with a bit of perseverance, you can achieve almost anything.

Working within constraints: Limited budget, time, and space forced creative problem-solving. Every project has constraints and you learn to work within them, making compromises as you go. Learn to be resourceful - by using Facebook Marketplace, Freecycle and other platforms, I was able to make my money go much further.

Seeing projects through: 4 years, solo, while working full-time. I don’t quit when things get hard.

The Results

After 4 years:

In conclusion, I made some mistakes, experienced burnout and made huge sacrifices. But I proved something to myself that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Hard work builds confidence and character and after finishing this project, I took that new-found confidence and quit my job in order to start a new career as a software/web developer.

If you’d like to know more about that transition, I’ll be writing up some coding projects on this platform so check back again soon!