Light, medium or full refurb: pricing the depth honestly
"Refurbishment" is the least precise word in construction. To one client it means fresh paint and a new bathroom; to another it means stripping a house back to brick and starting again. The word on the enquiry is the same. The jobs are not, and neither are the prices. Getting the depth right at quote stage is the whole game.
Three different jobs wearing one name
It helps to force every refurb enquiry into one of three bands before any pricing starts. The bands are not perfect, but they make the depth conversation happen early, which is exactly when it is cheap to have.
| Band | What it typically includes | What stays |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Decoration throughout, flooring, new kitchen or bathroom fit-out, minor repairs, new light fittings | Layout, services, plaster, windows |
| Medium | All of light, plus partial rewire or re-plumb, some re-plastering, a moved wall or two, new heating components | Structure, most plaster, roof |
| Full | Strip back to shell: full rewire, full re-plumb and heating, re-plaster throughout, new floors, possibly roof, windows, damp works and structural alterations | The walls, sometimes barely |
The cost gap between bands is not gentle. As a worked illustration, suppose a light refurb of a three-bed house lands around 25,000 GBP at your rates. The medium version of the same house might be 60,000 GBP, and the full version 120,000 GBP or more. Each band is roughly double the one before, because each band touches more layers of the building and each layer drags labour, waste, programme and disruption with it.
Why refurbs drift a band deeper than quoted
The classic refurb failure is quoting light and delivering medium. It happens through a hundred small discoveries: the plaster that comes away with the wallpaper, the wiring that fails inspection once opened up, the floor that is not level enough for the new kitchen, the damp patch behind the old units. None of these is anyone's fault. All of them were foreseeable as a category, even if not individually.
The estimator's job is not to predict each discovery but to price the probability of the band shifting. Older properties, properties that have been rented hard, and properties with visible deferred maintenance all carry a higher chance that opening up reveals work. That judgement belongs in your contingency and your assumptions, both of which should be visible, which is the territory of contingency: how much should a builder actually allow.
Survey for depth, not just for scope
A refurb survey has a different purpose from a new-build site visit. You are not just measuring rooms, you are dating the building's systems and testing the client's intentions. The checks that decide the band:
- Electrics: consumer unit age, cable colours, socket counts per room. A house with two sockets per room is getting a rewire whether the client has budgeted for it or not.
- Plumbing and heating: boiler age, pipe materials, radiator condition, water pressure.
- Plaster: tap-test a sample of walls in every room. Hollow, cracked or blown plaster turns "paint" into "re-skim" at scale.
- Damp and timber: ground-floor skirting, window reveals, chimney breasts, any smell in unventilated corners.
- Layout ambitions: every "could we just open this up" is a structural question with a steel and a building control fee attached.
Write down what you checked and what you could not check. The uncheckable list becomes your written assumptions, and your defence when the wall is opened. A fuller room-by-room routine is in the site survey checklist that saves quotes from surprises.
Pricing each band without fooling yourself
Light refurbs are rate-driven: decoration, flooring and fit-out price accurately per room or per square metre, and the risk is low. Price them sharp and win them.
Medium refurbs are the dangerous middle. They contain enough opening-up to generate surprises, but clients anchor on light-refurb money. Price the defined work at your rates, put honest provisional sums against the partial systems work, and resist the pressure to blend the two into one optimistic number.
Full refurbs behave more like new builds in reverse: the strip-out is measurable, the rebuild is specifiable, and the unknowns concentrate in the existing structure and services. Waste is a genuinely large line here, not an afterthought, and it deserves proper measurement as covered in waste, skips and disposal.
Have the depth conversation before the price conversation
The most valuable ten minutes in any refurb sale is walking the client through the three bands and asking which one they think they are buying. Often they genuinely do not know, and the act of choosing calibrates their budget before your number arrives. A quote for the wrong band, however accurate, loses twice: too high for the light job they imagined, too low for the medium job they actually need.
When the depth is agreed, describe the job properly and let the pricing follow the description. That is exactly how QS Quoter works: describe the refurb, or upload the drawings where they exist, and it produces a fully itemised quote at your day rates, your materials uplift and your margin. Every line is editable, so shifting a room from re-skim to full re-plaster is a line change, not a rewrite, and the client copy stays clean while your private copy keeps the cost workings.
Price the refurb the client is actually buying
Describe the job, set the depth, and QS Quoter produces an itemised draft at your rates: client copy for them, private cost breakdown for you, every line editable when the band shifts.
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