As I have recently explored in this blog, remortgaging to finance home improvements such as an extension, loft conversion, new kitchen etc. can be a good way to get the vital capital you need. For many it is the only realistic way to afford the house of your dreams.
As a mortgage broker I have helped numerous clients to remortgage for this reason, and last year I became my own client and remortgaged so we could do extensive work on our house.
This is my story (part 1)…
My family moved house in 2015 with grand plans, the house we were moving to was double the size of the one we had been living in for nearly ten years, exciting times! However, we always planned to improve the property and last year we started work. In this post I’m going to try and impart some of my experiences and what lessons have been learned.
From a financial perspective it made sense, the location of the house is a bit further out of town than we originally were, but still a nice area. Our old terrace sold for £415,000 and our new place at 1850 square feet represented good value for money at £490,000.
Needless to say at that price we knew the place was going to need a bit of work but we weren’t in a position to carry out the work immediately, you see I had a plan!
Step 1: Add value so you can Remortgage
As I’ve said in previous blogs when you borrow for home improvements you can only borrow against the current value of your home. So we didn’t have any room to get the £100,000 that I estimated we would need to carry out the extensive refurbishment we envisaged. Therefore we bought the house with the intention of living there for a couple of years and then remortgaging to get the funds together after two years. We still needed to add value though, without spending too much, so we could get out the money we needed. My estimate at the time was that we needed to get the value to £650,000 in that two year period.
We had a relatively high mortgage on our last place as we had had some works carried out there and had borrowed to pay for it. We ended up with a mortgage of £392,000 on the new place so an 80% mortgage. This enabled us to keep some funds back, approx £10,000, to smarten the place up a bit.
Our new house is a 1960’s bungalow that had been extended in places, two bedroom downstairs and two upstairs in a dormer loft conversion that the previous owners had carried out a number of years ago. The décor was questionable at best and I didn’t feel the work that had been carried out was to a particularly high standard. There was a decent looking kitchen in there that, although ultimately we won’t keep, was good enough for a couple of years. The general layout of the property was a bit odd as well, but we loved the size of the place and set to work almost immediately.
We had to decide where to spend the £10k, but to be honest it was pretty easy. The main bedroom downstairs had an en-suite that had seen better days, equally the family bathroom in the dormer also needed updating. We employed a friend who does bathrooms and he set about the task of fixing us up with two new bathrooms. We went for good quality fixtures and fittings, walk in showers, no baths, contemporary wall hung sink units, funky towel rails and cool tiles. They looked great and we were happy with the results on the whole.
After this I got my scruffs on and redecorated the main bedroom and the two bedrooms in the dormer, which are our kids’ rooms, new carpets were also fitted in these rooms. Other than that we didn’t make any visible improvements so when it came to remortgage after two years I had to make sure I spoke to the surveyor to pitch my case for a £650k valuation.