There’s no doubt that home owners these days are taking longer to consider whether to move to a bigger, more spacious property, or remain as is but to have extensive remodelling work done on the existing house. There are so many arguments for both approaches. When you think that when you sell up and move, there will be many pairs of hands involved in the operation. They will all get their piece of the pie, as it were. It will start off with the estate agent marketing the house; then comes the solicitor who handles the sale which will include fees going out for searches and dispersements – the searches are to find out if there are any building or adverse plans in the pipeline that would affect the house to be bought; is it built in a flood plain or other possibly problematic are; are there any major road building or other national transport changes arriving, like a new motorway or rail line within striking distance. There are many kinds of searches that have to be made of the local authority. The conveyanncing solicitor fee is a very high part of the moving cost. Before that will be any financial borrowing to be sorted out – selling the old house rarely produces enough to pay off the old mortgage and buy up a newer bigger place, so a newer bigger mortgage is going to be needed with bigger fees for arrangement etc. After this comes the removal itself. Depending on the distance and how many pantechnicons are needed. So that decision to just move and get it over with . . . may indeed cost as much as renovating and rebuilding the old house to make the space needed.
It is clear that a well experienced builder, especially if tied in with an architect, will be able to see the potential of any house and remodel it to be much more spacious. Taking out a bay window and replacing with a wide patio door or streamlining the kitchen units to form one long bank of much more useable work space and cabinetry. The comparable costings are definitely worth investigating.