Guide
Living through a renovation: occupied-home sequencing
Most people can stay for a single room. Very few enjoy staying for a whole flat.
The honest dividing line
A single kitchen or a single bathroom can usually be worked around you, provided there is an alternative for the room being replaced — a second WC, or somewhere to make tea that is not the building site. A whole-flat programme with one bathroom is a different proposition, and in that case decanting is usually both faster and cheaper than it looks.
The reason is sequence. Occupied working means the site is set up and broken down around your day, dust separation has to hold continuously rather than just while the trade is in the room, and some tasks cannot run in parallel. That adds time, and time is the thing an occupied programme is short of.
What occupied working actually involves
In practice: dust screens at room thresholds and, where possible, negative pressure in the work area; protected routes from the front door to the room; a daily tidy-down rather than a weekly one; and noisy work banded into agreed hours, particularly in a converted house or a mansion block where the neighbours have been told what to expect.
It also involves agreeing what stays usable. Typically that is a bedroom, a bathroom and somewhere to eat, and the programme is written so those three are not compromised at the same moment.
The pinch points
Water and power. Isolating either affects the whole flat rather than one room, so those interruptions are scheduled and told in advance rather than discovered. In a shared building, isolating a riser can affect neighbours, which brings the freeholder or the porter into the conversation.
Dust from cutting and chasing is the other. It is the reason first fix and any breaking-out are concentrated rather than spread across the programme, and the reason decoration comes last.
Deciding it at survey
We will say which way the balance falls once we have seen the property and the plan, and we would rather say it plainly than let a client discover a month in that they should have moved out.
Where decanting is right but not possible, the answer is not to pretend otherwise; it is to write a longer, more heavily sequenced programme and price it as such.
Questions
For decoration and much of a single-room refit, often yes, if the work is at the other end of the flat. For strip-out, first fix and any breaking-out, no — that is genuinely loud, and no amount of planning changes it. Those days are identified in the programme so you can arrange to be elsewhere rather than finding out on the morning.
Screened thresholds, protected floors along the route in and out, dust extraction at the tool where the tool takes it, and a tidy-down at the end of each day rather than at the end of the week. It is not perfect — no occupied site is — but the difference between a managed site and an unmanaged one is the entire experience of living through it.
The work this applies to
Where this comes up
Related guides
- The order of works in a light refurbishment
In a whole-flat programme the sequence is the thing you are buying. Everything else is materials and labour.
- What decides the cost of a kitchen or bathroom renovation
There is no price list on this site. What follows is what actually moves the figure, so that a proposal reads as a set of decisions rather than a number.