We have been quoted for eight sash windows and full replastering of two rooms and both the number and the timeline are roughly triple what I had in my head from watching too much renovation television. Partly I want to know whether we are being taken for a ride, partly I want to know whether the calendar is real. How long were you actually living in dust for something this size?
Ours was six sashes and one large room replastered, done by two different trades. The windows were out of the house for about three weeks in a workshop, which nobody warned us about, so we lived with boarded openings and it was cold and dark and grim. The plastering was four days of work and about three weeks before it was ready to paint. So the working days were maybe fifteen and the calendar was closer to two months, and the two months is what you actually experience.
On sashes specifically, understand what you are being quoted for, because refurbishment and replacement are different jobs at very different prices and people use the words loosely. Full refurbishment means the sashes come out, get stripped, any decayed timber spliced in, new cords, new parting beads, draught proofing brushes routed in, reglazed if needed, then reinstalled and painted. That is a day or more per window for one person once you count the making good, so eight windows is not a week no matter what anyone tells you. Ask specifically how many are being repaired versus how many need new bottom rails, because that is where the price spreads out.
Three quotes, itemised per window, and ask each of them how long the sashes will be off site. That last question sorts the real joiners from the optimists faster than the price does.
Pushing back slightly on the assumption that the quote is high. For that scope, from a firm that does sash work properly rather than a general builder having a go, triple your television estimate sounds entirely normal to me. Get two more quotes by all means, but if all three land in the same region, the number is the number and the television was the thing that was wrong.
@hemline_hank · 6mo ago · 3 replies
What television removes is everything that is not filmable. Waiting three weeks for a joiner who is finishing another job, waiting for plaster to dry properly before decorating, the day spent moving furniture and masking, the second visit because a sash cord snapped on a window they had already done. It also removes the fact that many of those programmes have materials or labour supplied on favourable terms in exchange for being on screen, which is not a scandal but it does mean the numbers on the screen are not numbers you can plan with. The work itself is genuinely not that dramatic, the calendar around it is where the time goes.
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@seedstart_sim · 6mo ago
Weeks, and if you paint too early with the wrong paint you get to do it twice. That episode does not exist either.
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@darning_egg_dee · 6mo ago
Waiting for plaster to dry before decorating is exactly the sort of thing that never appears on screen and is weeks of my life.
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