Renovation of old buildings, what awaits us

Hello,

we are planning to purchase a single-family house.

Here are some details:

Year built: 1957
Living area: 130 sqm / with basement
Plot size: 830 sqm
Price: €85,000

Gas heating from 2005
Garage
Windows from 1980
Double-shell exterior walls
3-core cables without RCD
Clay roof tiles / no insulation

That should be enough for now.

We really like the layout of the rooms.

- Upstairs, only a non-load-bearing wall needs to be demolished to install a large bathroom.
- Downstairs there is a guest WC. This also needs to be renewed.
- Inside, everything has to be completely stripped, i.e. carpets and wallpapers.
- The subfloor consists of wooden floorboards which we at least want to sand and restore in the living room.
- In the upper rooms, we want to just repaint the floorboards for now.
- The windows must be replaced.
- New kitchen (reroute connections)
- Blown-in insulation or ETICS [external thermal insulation composite system]

The electrical distribution is from around 1980 but already 3-core, however without RCD. The question now is whether to completely renew the electrical distribution since the walls are going to be open anyway.

The pipes are galvanized and according to the real estate agent do not need to be renewed.

We have a building inspector on site tomorrow who will thoroughly examine the entire house.

We initially naively estimated €70,000 for the renovation.
We basically have a shell and will rebuild it from the inside.

What are your experiences with such renovations, what additional issues might arise that we haven't thought of, where could problems occur?

We are already agreed with the real estate agent that he will "hold" the house for us; we are happy to cover the cost for the inspector. If everything is okay, we will feel good and if he says stay away, he will have saved us from a bad purchase. Also, he will roughly tell us what costs we can expect.

Do you generally have experience with houses from the 1950s regarding the building fabric or "durability"?

Best regards

Sorry, but what is the standard land value or price per sqm with you? Without knowing, I would assign the house a value of 0 based on the stated values and thus assume much higher renovation costs...

So in the new development area in the town, the price per sqm is €52.

Well, unseen I also estimate significantly higher costs for the renovation. The roof is still the original??? Otherwise, here alone a mid five-figure amount would soon be due. I would redo the electrical work if the walls are open anyway. If you do it yourself and order the material online, depending on the equipment, you will probably get by with approx. €5000, open-ended upwards, keyword KNX. If there was always water in the pipes, they are very likely still okay, the expert may be able to say more here. But here a wall out, there bathrooms, windows and floors new, etc. The 70k is probably the absolute minimum, if the roof needs to be redone, then well over 100k.

Yes, unfortunately the roof is still the original one. For the kitchen and bathroom, we are also budgeting around 25k. Then the 70,000 might indeed be set somewhat too low. Although the real estate agent said it only needs to be insulated from the inside. But even then, I'll wait to see what the appraiser says.

The whole thing is quite tempting because it would still be cheaper than a new build. The question is whether it will be worthwhile in the long run, since you always have to do some work on it from time to time.

On the topic of the roof:

You don't have to bring the whole house up to new build standards.

You can save a lot here too.

Remove the roof covering yourself, have the rafters checked by the roofer and install the membrane, then re-roof the roof yourself. Possibly with the "old" tiles.