What My First Renovation Project Taught Me That No Book Ever Could
My first renovation project should have been a relatively simple one. New kitchen, new bathroom, decoration throughout, and replacement double glazed windows. I’d planned the budget, I knew what I wanted to do, and I felt — as most people do on their first project — that I had a reasonable handle on what was involved. I didn’t.
The windows were where it started to go differently from the plan, though ‘go wrong’ is probably too strong a way of putting it. What happened was that I encountered something I simply hadn’t known about, and I encountered it courtesy of a window fitter who could clearly see he was dealing with a first-timer and very kindly decided to take me under his wing.
When I’d ordered the replacement double glazing, I’d assumed it was essentially a straight swap — old windows out, new ones in. The window fitter explained, gently, that it wasn’t quite that simple. The new windows, being modern and designed differently from the originals, wouldn’t be able to carry the structural load that the original frames had been bearing above the ground floor openings. What I needed, he told me, were lintels — steel or concrete lintels installed above the window openings to take the load properly before the new frames went in.
This wasn’t in my original plan. It wasn’t in my original budget. But rather than feeling defeated by it, I found myself quietly determined to deal with it myself. I went to the builder’s merchant, asked enough questions to understand what I needed, bought the right lintels, and installed them. I was — I’ll be honest about this — quite pleased with myself. It was the first genuinely unexpected thing the project had thrown at me and I’d handled it. What I hadn’t anticipated was that it wouldn’t be the last.
In the process of fitting the new windows, particularly at the rear of the property, the pebble dash render around the window openings was inevitably disturbed. And once I started looking at it closely, I noticed something I hadn’t had any reason to look at carefully before: a significant amount of the pebble dash on the rear elevation had blown — detached from the wall behind it, hollow underneath, coming away in sections. It was old render that had reached the end of its useful life, and the activity around the window installation had simply made what was already there more obvious.
This wasn’t the window fitter’s fault. The render was already gone — it just hadn’t been visible in a way that had made me think about it when I was putting the project together. But once I could see that it was loose and disturbed around the windows, I could see that it was loose well beyond the windows too. The whole rear elevation needed stripping and re-rendering. There wasn’t a version of events where I could ignore it and move on.
Which is how I came to spend several days up a ladder at eaves height, hacking off render with a bolster chisel. I’ll tell you now that I was doing this with nobody holding the ladder, which was not sensible and is not something I’d recommend to anyone. I was younger and considerably less cautious than I am now, and it was not my finest hour from a safety point of view. But I got it all stripped back to the original brickwork, and then found a plasterer who also worked with external render to come and apply the base coat and pebble dash the elevation properly.
By the time the project was finished, it had taken roughly two weeks longer than I’d planned and cost meaningfully more than I’d budgeted — not catastrophically more, but noticeably more. And the extra cost and extra time hadn’t come from anything I’d done wrong, exactly. They’d come from things I simply hadn’t known to look for, and couldn’t have known, until the project revealed them.
There are a few things that first project taught me that I still think about now, thirty-odd years and well over 150 projects later. The first is that you genuinely don’t know what you don’t know, and this isn’t a personal failing — it’s just the nature of first projects. Nobody starts with experience. You accumulate it by doing, and doing something for the first time always means finding things that weren’t in the plan. The window fitter who explained about lintels was doing me a genuine service; the blown render revealed itself when it was ready to. Neither of them was in my budget or my schedule, and both of them were essentially unknowable until they showed up.
The second thing is that older properties have layers. What you can see on a viewing, or even on a detailed inspection before you buy, is the surface. What’s underneath — the condition of the render, the state of the original joinery, what’s been patched and bodged over decades — reveals itself gradually, usually once you start opening things up and disturbing things that haven’t been disturbed for years. This is not a reason to avoid older properties; they’ve served me well over a long career. But it is a very good reason to approach them with a budget that has genuine room in it, because the surprises are not a question of if, they’re a question of when and how much.
The third thing — and this is the one that took the longest to really understand — is that the knowledge you need for this is largely earned rather than taught. You can read about renovation projects, you can talk to people who’ve done them, and all of that has real value. But there’s a kind of practical understanding that only comes from actually being on site when something unexpected happens and having to work out what to do about it. My first project gave me that. By my second and third, I was already approaching things differently — not because I’d read more, but because I’d been up the ladder.
Here’s to successful property renovating.
Peter Jones
(ex) Chartered Surveyor, author and property investor
PS By the way, I’ve completely rewritten and updated my course for 2026, The Successful Property Renovator’s Workshop — a comprehensive guide to renovating properties properly and profitably, based on my own experience across well over 150 projects over thirty years.
thepropertyteacher.co.uk/the-successful-property-renovators-workshop
