House Refurbishment Greenwich

House refurbishment in Greenwich means renewing the fabric of a whole house without re-planning it: wiring, pipework, heating, plaster, floors, joinery, windows, roof repairs and then decoration. Houses make up 45% of the borough's homes on the VOA count, and terraced houses alone are 31% of all homes. The housing runs from post-war and modern estates to Victorian terraces and a Georgian core by the park, so the same brief can mean lime and sash repairs on one street and asbestos checks on the next.

For Greenwich, published UK figures put a three-bed house refurbishment at £43,530 to £110,350, and London houses usually cost more, with a London architect allowing £1,800 to £2,200 per square metre before VAT (Checkatrade and Bradley Van Der Straeten Architects, 2026). GS Renovation Ltd, a building contractor based in Potters Bar, does the work in Greenwich: we renew the wiring, pipework, heating, plaster, floors and joinery of the whole house under one contract, and a registered electrician certifies the rewire.

What the age of a Greenwich house means for the strip-out

The age of the house decides what the strip-out reveals. With 22% of Greenwich homes built before 1919, a period refurbishment here often opens up lath and plaster ceilings, lime-based walls, rubber or fabric cable and lead or iron supply pipes. Those finds set the sequence: wiring and pipework come out and go back while the walls are open, and lime surfaces are repaired with breathable materials rather than sealed with gypsum and plastic paint.

The interwar share, 17% of homes, brings a different fabric: cavity or solid brick walls, original steel windows in some houses and suspended timber ground floors that need their airbricks kept clear. Homes built after 1945, 60% of the stock, raise a different check. Asbestos was used in building products for much of the post-war period, so textured ceilings, floor tiles, boxing and soffits are sampled before they are disturbed. We hold a contingency in the programme for what opening up finds, so the decorating dates are not fixed before the first wall is stripped.

Housing in Greenwich

The Council Tax list puts Greenwich at about 125,080 homes, 55% flats against 45% houses; 22% went up before 1919, 17% between the wars and 60% after 1945. A whole house in Greenwich is refurbished as one building, roof down, which matters here because most homes are flats.

Windows, doors and roofs on a Greenwich house in a conservation area

Check the designation before ordering new windows or a new front door for a Greenwich house. Royal Greenwich has 23 conservation areas, and the council's list marks which of them are under Article 4 directions. Where a direction applies, work that would normally be permitted development needs an application, and Royal Greenwich says you may need planning permission for most works in those areas. Replacing timber sashes with uPVC, changing a panelled door or swapping slate for concrete tiles are the kinds of refurbishment item a direction can catch.

Two Greenwich examples show how specific these rules are. The Rectory Field Conservation Area Article 4 direction requires planning permission at the listed addresses for window or door changes and for side or rear extensions. The Progress Estate was granted Article 4 Direction status by the Department of the Environment in 1973. On houses like these, repair usually beats replacement: we splice new timber into rotten sash boxes, reglaze with putty and overhaul the pulleys, which keeps the house within its consent and its character.

Noise, scaffolds and skips outside a Greenwich house

Royal Greenwich usually limits noisy construction work to 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 1pm on Saturdays, with none on Sundays and bank holidays. On a whole-house job that means chasing walls, breaking out old hearths and cutting floor boards happen inside those windows, and decorating or second fix fills the edges of the day. The borough notes that the Control of Pollution Act 1974 gives Environmental Health special powers to control noise from building works, so a neighbour's complaint can reshape the programme.

Outside, the house itself sets the logistics. No skip licence is needed for a skip kept in a front garden or driveway, which suits a semi or detached house with a drive. A terrace with no front garden needs a roadside skip, and that licence is applied for by an approved skip company and is usually valid for 30 days. Scaffolding and hoarding licences are charged by the month, so roof, gutter and chimney-stack repairs are grouped into one scaffold period. A stack shared with next door needs a party wall notice under the Party Wall etc. Act before it is repaired or rebuilt, and you serve that notice as the building owner. Deliveries and vans are planned around the parking controls on your street.

Building control notices on a Greenwich house refurbishment

Most of a house refurbishment is repair and needs no building control application, but some items do, and Greenwich has its own procedure for them. Royal Greenwich building control says a building notice should only be used for simple work, such as a through room, chimney removal or drainage alteration. It needs two days notice before any work under a building notice starts. Renewing a large share of a roof or wall, or replacing windows, brings in the thermal requirements of Part L, and a new boiler or rewire is notified through the installer's own scheme.

During the job, Royal Greenwich building control site inspections must be booked at least 2 working days before the inspection, so we book them against the programme rather than on the day the ceiling is ready to close. At the end, a completion notice must be sent within five days of completing the work, and the client, agent or builder can send it. For a Greenwich house, we collect the electrical, gas and window paperwork as each trade finishes, so the file is complete when the last room is decorated.

• Floorboard lifting, joist repairs and relaying on every floor
• Decoration throughout the house, woodwork and ceilings included
• Replacement windows to Approved Document L where sashes are beyond repair

VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for all 35 statistical areas in Greenwich. Counts rounded by the VOA.

When comparing house refurbishment in Greenwich with other work, it helps to read home renovation in Greenwich, our Greenwich area guide, a building contractor for a whole-house refurbishment, which parts of a house refurbishment building control inspects, house refurbishment anywhere in London and Living In During the Work.

The GS Renovation Difference in Greenwich

A whole-house refurbishment has many trades in a set order, and the order is what keeps it on time: strip-out, first fix, plastering, second fix, then decoration. We phase the work room by room if you are living in the house, or run it as one open site if it is empty. The registered electrician certifies the wiring and an engineer on the Gas Safe Register handles any gas work. For probate or pre-sale jobs, where the owner is often not local, we send photographs at each stage and a written record of what was found.

• Every wall of the house tapped and every circuit tested before the refurbishment is priced
• Provisional sums for what lies behind the plaster shown as separate lines
• Our own trades on site rather than a chain of subcontractors

Reviewed jobs near Greenwich

1 MyBuilder review from Woolwich, with each customer's own job title:

• Replace kitchen extractor hob, Woolwich, 27 Apr 2024 (5 out of 5)

Read all 31 on our reviews page.

Checked by Abdelaaziz Saaid, founder and director of GS Renovation Ltd (Companies House no. 14611254).