Most people planning a renovation ask two questions early: what will it cost, and am I allowed to do it. We have written about both. What gets asked much later, usually somewhere around week two of the actual build, is the question that affects daily life the most: how long is this really going to take, and what is it going to be like living in the middle of it. Not the number on the quote — the lived version. The number of mornings you make tea in a bathroom sink. The number of weeks the good plates stay in a box in the spare room.
We would rather answer this properly before you start than have you find out room by room. What follows is honest about both halves: how long different projects actually take on an East London terrace, and what the weeks in the middle genuinely involve.
How long each type of project actually takes
These are site durations — the weeks the trades are physically working in the house — not the time from first phone call to finished room, which runs longer once design, ordering and any approvals are added. The cost side of the same projects is in our guide to what a renovation actually costs in East London.
A bathroom
3 to 4 weeks on site. Strip-out and first-fix plumbing move quickly; tiling and the wait for adhesive and grout to cure properly is what actually sets the pace, not the fitting itself.
A kitchen
6 to 10 weeks on site, depending on how much of the fabric is involved, longer where a wall comes out or drainage moves. Units go in fast once the room is ready. Getting the room ready — first fix, plastering, flooring — is most of the time.
Internal remodelling
8 to 12 weeks, depending on how many walls move and whether steel goes in. A single knock-through is at the short end; reconfiguring a whole ground floor is at the long end.
A loft conversion
10 to 14 weeks. Structural work and the staircase drive the programme more than the finish does.
An extension
14 to 20 weeks on site for a side return or rear extension, longer for a wraparound — the same range as in our cost guide. Add the planning and party wall runway ahead of the start date — covered in our guide to planning permission for a Victorian terrace — and the gap between deciding to extend and moving into the new room is usually five to seven months in total.
A whole-house renovation
6 to 9 months on site, sometimes longer on the largest scopes with a loft and an extension in the same programme. This is the project where sequencing matters most, because so much of the house is out of use at once.
Period restoration
6 to 10 weeks on site for a front elevation, longer across a full external restoration programme. Repointing and sash window work is often weather-dependent, which we sequence around the season rather than force through it.
What actually eats the time
Before the first day on site, there is a runway most people underestimate: agreeing the scope and the fixed price (see how to read a builder's quote), ordering anything with a long lead time — kitchen units, windows, a bespoke staircase — and, where the project needs it, planning consent and party wall notices, which run their own statutory clocks regardless of how quickly the building work itself could start. None of this is wasted time. It is the part of the programme that, done properly, is what lets the timeline given become the timeline kept once work actually begins.
On site, the sequence is largely fixed by physics rather than choice. Strip-out and structural work — steels, openings, foundations — come first, because everything after depends on them. First fix follows: the electrics, plumbing and heating that disappear behind walls and under floors. Then comes the part that genuinely cannot be rushed — plaster and screed need real time to dry before anything can be tiled, painted or laid on top of them, and forcing that stage cracks tiles and blisters paint within a year. Second fix — kitchen units, sanitaryware, flooring, skirting, the switches and sockets going back on — is where a site starts looking like a finished room again. Decoration and snagging close it out; what "closed out" actually means is in our piece on what good snagging actually looks like.
The two numbers that are not the same
A quote gives you a number of weeks on site. It is a different number from how long it takes before the room feels properly finished and back in normal use, because the last stretch — final coats, ironmongery, the snag list — is short on the programme but matters most to how the room feels day to day. We separate the two on purpose. A renovation is finished when the snag list is closed, not when the last trade packs up their van, and we would rather tell you that plainly than let "nearly done" quietly become the next six weeks.
Living through it
Whether you stay in the house depends on the project, and we will tell you honestly which kind yours is. A bathroom or a kitchen on their own, we can usually work around — sequencing a multi-bathroom house so one is always usable, or rigging a temporary kitchen nearby with a kettle, a microwave and a fridge so cooking does not stop for two months. A full internal remodelling, a loft conversion or a whole-house renovation is a different proposition: most clients move out for the noisiest, dustiest phase — strip-out and first fix — and move back once second fix begins and the house is quiet and closed up again.
If you are staying in the house, containment is not an afterthought. Dust sheeting and temporary partitions separate the working area from the rest of the house properly, not loosely; noisy work keeps to agreed hours; and access to the parts of the house you still need — a bedroom, a working bathroom, a way out the front door with the pram — is planned before the skip arrives, not worked out on the day. We take every project on as if we were going to live in it, and that includes thinking about what it is like to actually live in it while it happens.
Where the timeline slips, and how we hold it anyway
Three things move a programme, in the order we see them most. The first is what a period house turns out to be hiding once a wall or a floor is opened — joists that have moved, a chimney breast built on nothing, brickwork that is not what the survey suggested. We have written about this at length in what hides behind the walls of a Victorian terrace, and it is exactly why we build contingency into a period-house programme rather than quoting it like a new build. The second is permissions and party wall notices started late instead of lined up before the start date — entirely avoidable, and the reason we work out the planning position before we quote. The third is decisions arriving after the point they were needed: a tile choice, a tap, a paint colour, agreed a fortnight after the wall it belongs to has already been plastered. This one is the easiest to prevent and the one we are strictest about — materials are agreed before they are ordered, and changes are agreed before they are made.
What we do not let move is communication about the ones that do. One number to call and one person who answers means that when something changes the programme, you hear it from me directly and early, not from a missed day on site you notice yourself. If the plasterer needs another morning because the skim is not quite right yet, I will tell you, and we will wait the morning. The timeline given is the timeline kept — and where it genuinely cannot be, because of what a hundred-and-thirty-year-old wall was hiding, you will know before it costs you a week you did not see coming.
If you are weighing up a project and trying to picture the shape of it — not just the price, but the actual months — that is exactly what the free first hour is for. We will give you a realistic programme for your house, not a headline number designed to get you to sign.