House Refurbishment Stevenage

House refurbishment in Stevenage is work on post-war fabric in all but a few cases. 96% of the town's homes were built after 1945, 76% are houses, and 52% are terraced houses, so the usual job here is a New Town terrace whose wiring, heating, plaster and windows are ageing together. We renew the whole house in one programme, from strip out to decoration, without re-planning the rooms, and hand it back with the certificates for every service we touched.

For Stevenage, published UK figures put a three-bed house refurbishment at £43,530 to £110,350, 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 Stevenage: 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 a 1950s to 1970s Stevenage house needs renewing

Usually the services and the finishes rather than the structure. 12,390 homes, 32.2 per cent of the Stevenage stock, were built between 1955 and 1964. A house of that age can have decades of patched wiring, an old consumer unit, galvanised or early copper pipework, and thin partitions carrying layers of filler. The Local Plan states that the town's buildings, largely from the 1950s to the 1970s, are coming to the end of their useful life, and an opened up wall tends to confirm it.

We survey before we price: lift floorboards, look behind the consumer unit, check the loft insulation and the tank, and note where earlier owners altered the layout. Homes of this age can contain asbestos in textured ceilings, floor tiles and boxing, so an asbestos survey for refurbishment comes before any strip out. That gives a scope you can trust, a list of what a registered electrician and a Gas Safe engineer will replace, and a programme that puts first fix before any plaster.

Housing in Stevenage

Roughly 38,430 dwellings sit on the valuation list for Stevenage. 76% are houses and 24% flats, and by age 2% predate 1919, 1% are interwar and 96% post-war. Rewiring a terrace in Stevenage means noisy chasing on two shared walls, and 52% of homes here are terraced.

Broadwater no-fines houses and the insulation they need

They need insulating from the inside, with the condensation risk designed out. Work began on the Broadwater neighbourhood in Stevenage in 1953, and the council records that some of the first houses there were Wimpey no-fines homes, their outer walls cast in concrete poured into large reusable moulds in one operation. A solid concrete wall has no cavity to fill, so the choice is internal wall insulation with a vapour control layer, or leaving the wall alone and working on the loft, floors and windows instead.

Internal insulation takes some depth off every outside wall, so skirting, sockets, radiators and window reveals all move. We set that out room by room before the rewire is first fixed, so cables and pipes land in the new wall line rather than being cut back later. The council describes Broadwater's two storey terraces as rows of six to ten houses, so most are mid terrace with a party wall either side and only front and back walls exposed. An end house also has a solid gable to the weather, which is where its insulation budget goes first.

Roofs, chimneys and walls in Stevenage conservation areas

The exterior is repaired to match rather than modernised. Stevenage has seven conservation areas: Broadwater, Old Town High Street, Orchard Road, Shephall Green, St Nicholas and Rectory Lane, Symonds Green, and Town Square. In the Broadwater Conservation Area, the management plan treats artificial cladding and wall coatings as inappropriate on any elevation, and asks that walls and stone detailing which were never painted stay undecorated. Cladding or rendering a house in a conservation area is also outside permitted development, so it would need planning permission.

All of Stevenage's conservation area plans except the Town Square one say that chimney stacks add to local character and should be kept and repaired. In a refurbishment that means repointing, new flaunching, flashings renewed with the roof, and a cowl or cap where the flue is no longer used, rather than taking the stack down to save a repair. The same scaffold gives access to gutters, fascias and the roof covering, so those are surveyed and renewed in the same visit.

Working hours, skips and access on a Stevenage street

Stevenage construction noise hours are 7:30am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 1pm on Saturday. Breaking out screeds, chasing walls for new cables and skip loading all fall inside those windows, so a full house refurbishment is planned around them. On a terrace with a neighbour through a single party wall, we tell them the noisy days in advance and keep Saturday mornings for quieter tasks such as painting and second fix.

Access is the other constraint. Hertfordshire County Council provides the county level functions in Stevenage, including the highways, so a skip on the road needs its permit, while a skip on your own drive does not. On estates laid out on the Radburn principle, such as Burydale in Broadwater, footpaths and vehicle access are separated, so materials often travel from a parking court along a path. We plan deliveries, bag collections and a wheelbarrow route before the strip out begins.

• Whole-house rewires, certified at completion by a registered electrician
• Replacement windows to Approved Document L where sashes are beyond repair
• Smoke, heat and carbon monoxide alarms fitted to current rules on every storey

VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for all 12 statistical areas in Stevenage. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Useful next reading for a house refurbishment project in Stevenage: home renovation in Stevenage, house refurbishment in Hitchin, a building contractor for a whole-house refurbishment, a snagging list before a refurbished house is handed back, house refurbishment across London and Signs You Need to Rewire.

Why Stevenage Homeowners Choose GS Renovation

A house refurbishment involves many trades, and the order matters more than any single one. We run strip out, first fix, plastering, second fix and decoration as one programme with one point of contact, and we tell you at survey whether the house can stay lived in or should be empty. Electrical work is certified by a registered electrician, and gas work is carried out by a Gas Safe engineer. You get a written schedule of what is being replaced before any walls are opened.

• Asbestos sampling arranged before textured ceilings or old floor tiles are disturbed
• One point of contact from first survey to handover
• Radiators, sockets and switches positioned at first fix, never after decorating

Reviewed jobs near Stevenage

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

• Kitchen worktops, Stevenage, 24 Jun 2021 (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).