Living in Your Home During a Renovation

Renovating while living in your home is doable, but it tests your patience, and it changes the job as well as your week. A builder working around an occupied house works in smaller pieces, protects more, and finishes later. Here is how to decide whether to stay, what it costs either way, and how to keep daily life running when you do stay.

Should you stay or move out?

Stay for one room at a time. Move out for anything that takes the whole house apart at once: a full house renovation, a full rewire, or structural work that puts the ground floor out of use. The table below is how we assess it before we price an occupied project.

What does moving out actually cost?

In London, rent is the bulk of it. ONS put average monthly private rent for a one-bedroom property in London at £1,733 in May 2026, so a four month move-out during a whole-house job is around £7,000, and a six month one closer to £10,000. Add a deposit, agency fees, a self-storage unit at roughly £100 to £300 a month for a two-bedroom load, and a removal firm at each end.

Set against that, the build runs faster and the contractor's setting-up costs are lower, because trades work a floor at a time rather than a room at a time. The honest comparison is not rent against nothing. It is rent against a longer, dearer and more stressful build. Our budget and contingency guide puts accommodation in the wider cost stack.

Set up a temporary kitchen

Set it up before the old kitchen comes out, not after. A working temporary kitchen is a kettle, a microwave, an air fryer or a single induction hob, a fridge, and somewhere to wash up that is not the bathroom basin you also clean your teeth in. Expect to be without a proper kitchen for 3 to 5 weeks.

• Pick a room on a circuit that will stay live through the works, and confirm it with the electrician first. A utility room, a garage or a dining room usually works.
• Keep the old sink connected as long as the programme allows. We will often leave the existing sink and one base unit live until the day the new units land, which buys two or three extra weeks of running water.
• Move the washing machine somewhere with a spare waste and supply. Losing laundry for a month costs more in launderette trips and temper than the plumber's hour.
• Batch cook and freeze before strip out, and treat the takeaway budget as part of the project budget.

Protect a clean living zone

Seal one part of the house properly and treat everything else as a building site. Half measures do not work with construction dust: it is fine enough to travel under doors, through ceiling voids and along the gaps beside floorboards, and a bed sheet taped over a doorway will not stop it.

• Zip doors in proper dust screens, not draped sheets, fixed to the frame rather than the architrave, plus sealed floorboard gaps and covered vents in the rooms below.
• Insist on on-tool extraction and an M-class vacuum for cutting, chasing and sanding. Silica dust from brick, block, concrete and screed is controlled under HSE rules and is not something to be relaxed about in an occupied house.
• Get a refurbishment and demolition asbestos survey before anything is opened up in a property built or refurbished before 2000. Textured coatings, floor tiles, insulating board around boilers and cement soffits are routine finds in London stock. Left undisturbed and in good condition it is usually best alone; disturbed by a homeowner with a multi-tool it is a serious problem.
• Keep children and pets out of the work zone entirely, including at weekends when the site is quiet but the hazards are not.

When will the water, heating and power be off?

More often, and for longer, than most people expect on a services-heavy job. Ask for the outage dates in writing at the start rather than the evening before, and plan the household week around them.

• Water. Off for a few hours at a time during first fix, and for a full day or more when the incoming main, the cylinder or the heating system is changed. Fill containers the night before an all-day isolation.
• Electricity. Off circuit by circuit during first fix, and for a full day when the consumer unit is changed and tested. During a rewire that is 3 to 6 days of disruption in a three-bedroom house.
• Heating and hot water. Out for two days to two weeks depending on what is replaced. Renovating through January without heating is a different experience from renovating through June, which is a real argument for scheduling services work in the warmer half of the year.
• Internet. Cabling positions move with the electrics, so agree where the master socket and the router go before first fix, not after plastering.

Which weeks are genuinely unliveable?

Four of them, and they are predictable enough to book a holiday around. If you are staying for the rest of the project, spend the money on getting out for these rather than on the whole programme.

1. Strip out. The loudest and dirtiest week of the job, with skips, breakers and everything coming out at once.
2. Structural work. Cutting in a steel means percussive noise, brick dust and propping through the middle of the house. See removing a load-bearing wall.
3. First fix chasing. Chasing walls for cables and pipes produces the finest dust of the whole project, and it gets everywhere.
4. Plastering and drying out. Wet, cold and humid, with fresh skim needing 4 to 6 days before paint and the heating running to help it along.

Floor sanding belongs on the same list if original boards are being refinished. The order of works guide shows where each of these falls in the programme, so you can put dates against them months ahead.

Agree the ground rules upfront

Put the household arrangements in the contract alongside the price and the programme, because everything on this list is cheap to agree in advance and expensive to argue about in week three. This is what we settle at the pre-start meeting on an occupied project.

• Working hours and quiet times. Most London boroughs restrict noisy work to roughly 08:00 to 18:00 on weekdays and 08:00 to 13:00 on Saturdays, with nothing on Sundays or bank holidays. Confirm your borough's hours and whether you need anything tighter around a nap or a home office.
• Access and keys. Who holds a key, what happens with the alarm, and whether anyone needs to be home. A key safe removes most of the friction.
• The site WC and the site kettle. Trades need a toilet and somewhere to make tea. Nominate them, or they will nominate yours.
• Daily clean down, not stage clean down. The work zone swept and the walkways cleared at the end of each day.
• Skips, deliveries and parking, and who applies for the permit and the bay suspension.
• One point of contact and a fifteen minute weekly meeting, with decisions written down.

How we run an occupied project

We phase it so that you always have a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom that work: one bathroom finished before the second is touched, the existing kitchen kept live until the new units are on site, and the noisy and dusty operations grouped into blocks you can plan around rather than spread across the whole job. It costs a little more in setting up and taking down, and it is the difference between a household that copes and one that stops speaking to the builder by week four. Be honest about tolerance as well as logistics: anyone working from home, anyone with a respiratory condition, and any household with a baby or a shift worker in it should weight the decision towards moving out, whatever the table above says.

See also planning a home renovation, choosing a builder in London, Building Regulations explained and our snagging list guide for the handover stage. For a project plan and a phasing programme that works around your living arrangements, whether that is a whole-house renovation in London or a kitchen renovation, contact us or call 07472 424 226.