1930s semi, we can afford roughly two of the four now and the rest waits about eighteen months. Everyone says roof first, but the wiring is rubber and fabric on two circuits and the hall plaster is coming off in sheets. Nobody lives in the hall so I am tempted to leave it and put the money elsewhere. How did you sequence yours and what did waiting on the wrong thing actually cost you?
I plastered a room beautifully and had it chased to pieces fourteen months later when we finally did the wiring. Two coats of good work, a lot of my own weekends, and a plasterer's bill, all of it destroyed by a decision I made because the room looked bad and I wanted a win. If any wiring or plumbing is going to move within the next few years, do not put a finished surface over it.
Water first, always, and roof first is shorthand for that rather than a rule about roofs specifically. Before you spend anything on the roof itself, check the gutters, the downpipes, the pointing and the ground levels against the wall, because those cause a very large share of what people diagnose as roof problems and they cost a fraction of the price. A wet wall destroys plaster, rots timber and makes any insulation you add later actively harmful, so every pound spent inside a wet house is a pound spent twice. Once the house is dry, everything else is a preference question rather than a damage question.
Rubber and fabric insulated wiring is the one item on your list that jumps the queue regardless of everything above, and it is not a comfort question. That insulation goes brittle with age and heat and it does not announce itself before it fails. Get it looked at by a qualified electrician and get a written condition report rather than a verbal opinion, and then let that report set the priority instead of a forum. It may come back as two circuits to replace rather than a full rewire, which changes the budget conversation completely.
The condition report is the key move. Ours turned a quoted full rewire into a consumer unit plus one circuit, which freed up most of a year's budget.
Dry first, safe second, pretty last. The hall can look terrible for another year and it costs you nothing.
@deadline_dee · 3mo ago
Whatever you choose, group the destructive work into one window. Rewiring means chasing walls and lifting floors, replastering means dust everywhere and everything moved out, and doing those in the same eight weeks is dramatically less miserable and cheaper than doing them eighteen months apart. If you can possibly stretch to wiring and plaster together and leave the windows for later, that is the combination that saves the most, because the plasterer follows the electrician and makes good behind them.
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