At long last we have completed our biggest project to date – the conversion of a 220 square meter office into a 9 bedroom luxury HMO with 7 en-suite bathrooms, and a massive 70 square meters of shared communal space!
This has been a mammoth task involving a 12 month planning application process with Stockport Council, close to £150,000 spent on renovations, and a lot of sweat equity from myself to get it finished in time for tenants moving in (not something I plan to repeat on future projects).
We’ll be writing a few details posts over the coming weeks sharing a breakdown of the renovation costs, and the overall finances of the HMO as an ongoing investment, but to start with I thought some pictures of the finished project were long overdue.
Although cosmetically it looked ok when we bought it, the vendor had spent a bit of money decorating and carpeting the whole building to hide a number of issues including a cellar that was more like a swimming pool, and a roof which had more holes than Swiss cheese!
Communal Space
Keeping the entire lower ground floor as communal space wasn’t our initial intention, but thankfully we didn’t have any choice due to the local councillors objecting to our original plans. The resulting open plan living space has without doubt been the major selling point of the house and the reason we were able to achieve such high rents compared to local averages.
It started out looking ok (remember the coat of paint and carpets I mentioned earlier), but the more we stripped out, the wetter it got.
This added about £20,000 to the budget to tank the entire storey, but the result is an amazing ‘Big Brother’-esque space ideal for our young professional tenants.
Bedrooms & Bathrooms
The top two floors are taken up with 9 bedrooms ranging from 10 square meters up to 16 square meters, 7 of which have their own en-suites while the remain 2 share a bathroom.
We divided one of the larger rooms (photographed below), but in the main the layout of the building lent itself pretty well to our plans so there wasn’t a huge amount of structural work required.
We obviously cared about the final look of the bedrooms, but ultimately what this project showed us was that with unrivalled communal living space, the housemates had decided they wanted to live here before they had even seen the bedrooms.
Keep an eye out for our future articles where we’ll share all of the renovation costs for this commercial to residential HMO project, along with the income and costs over our early days with tenants in the house.
3 Responses
Stunning Project! Really inovative thinking and planning!
Thanks Joe, we’re really proud of it! How’s your own investing going?
I’m looking to get started myself. Unfortunately, what would have been my first deal fell through, as the survey picked up a structural issue which meant that the lender wouldn’t lend to me!
I only found your page this morning so I’m going to get to work browsing through it over the next few weeks! You guys have got some fantastic material and I hope to give it another go ASAP!