Quantity surveyors in London. Budgets and cost plans, priced line by line by our in-house quantity surveyor.
The most misleading thing about renovation pricing in London is a single number. It pretends to be an answer. A full house renovation is quoted as a band, and the band is wide. The width is not vagueness. It is the honest shape of the market. What puts a project at one end or the other is worth more. It is worth more than any headline figure.
What the band actually describes
It covers renovating a whole house end to end. Strip out, services rewired and re-plumbed. Walls, floors and ceilings renewed. Bathrooms and kitchen replaced, decorated throughout. At the lower end sits work to a durable family standard. It has sensible specification choices. At the upper end sits deeper intervention. It includes structural alteration, full height joinery, stone and underfloor heating throughout. Here the finish itself becomes the project.
The biggest driver is not size but depth. That means how much of the existing house survives. A renovation that keeps the plan sits low in the band. It renews the surfaces. One that moves the stair, opens the rear and re-imagines the plan sits high. Every moved wall drags structure, services and finishes along with it.
Where your own project sits
NU publishes its own rates rather than a market average. The build cost calculator carries every band, by work type and by tier. These run from a high end refurbishment through to a super prime finish. Reading the tier is the part that matters. A lateral apartment behind a listed facade with full bespoke joinery is priced differently. It is not priced off the same line as a family house renovation.
A builder may quote a figure a long way outside the published band. That could be in either direction. If so, ask what they have assumed. The answer is usually in what has been left out.
How to use the band before you have drawings
Take the internal area. Multiply it by both ends of the band for your level of work. Treat the result as the envelope every design decision has to live inside. Done this early, the arithmetic disciplines the design. The design does not shock the budget.
The other early decision is the route. The architect led and design and build routes distribute risk differently. On a whole house project, budgets quietly die in the gaps between separate firms.
A loft conversion added to the same programme is usually cheaper. Building it as a separate project later costs more. One scaffold, one team, one period of disruption.
One team, one contract, one number
NU Projects is a design and build practice established in 2010. Architecture, interior design, project management and construction sit under a single contract. So the figure you agree is carried by one accountable team. That runs from the first drawing to handover.
Send us the address and the internal area. We will tell you where in the published band the project genuinely sits.
To talk to the team, send two lines through the contact form. You can also call 020 7731 6841. We usually reply within a few hours, weekends included.
This is the work we do. Quantity surveyors in London, or ask for a cost estimate.
Published 25 August 2026. Written by the NU Projects studio, edited since for house style and accuracy.