A refurbishment in London takes anywhere from a few days for a single room to six months for a whole house. A bathroom typically takes two to four weeks, a kitchen three to five weeks, a full flat six to twelve weeks, and a whole-house refurbishment three to six months on site. Those are working timelines, not promises pulled from thin air, and the gap between the best and worst case usually comes down to planning, decisions and the surprises an old London building hides. This guide gives realistic durations and explains what stretches them.
Refurbishment timelines by project type
The most useful starting point is a realistic duration for each common project type, measured as time on site once work begins, excluding the pre-construction period covered later.
A single room refresh, redecoration, new flooring, minor repairs, takes a few days to two weeks. A bathroom refurbishment takes two to four weeks, because a small room contains every trade and tanking and tiling cannot be rushed. A kitchen takes three to five weeks once you account for first-fix services, units, worktop templating and appliances.
A full flat refurbishment, new kitchen and bathroom, rewire, replumb, replaster and redecorate throughout, takes six to twelve weeks depending on size and specification. A whole-house refurbishment runs three to six months, and longer where structural work, a loft conversion or an extension is involved.
The table sets out typical on-site durations. They assume a well-planned project with materials ordered ahead and decisions made before work starts; the same jobs run far longer when those conditions are not met.
Project type
Typical time on site
Single room refresh
A few days – 2 weeks
Bathroom refurbishment
2 – 4 weeks
Kitchen refurbishment
3 – 5 weeks
Full flat refurbishment
6 – 12 weeks
Whole-house refurbishment
3 – 6 months
Whole house with structural / loft work
5 – 9 months
Pre-construction: the time before anyone lifts a tool
The on-site durations above are only half the story. Before work starts there is a pre-construction period that owners routinely underestimate, and skipping it is the surest way to a delayed, over-budget project.
Design and specification come first: deciding the layout, choosing finishes, and producing a scope detailed enough to price and build. For a simple refurbishment this might be a fortnight; for a whole house it can be six to twelve weeks. Then there are consents, where relevant: a leaseholder's licence to alter can take four weeks to four months, planning permission around eight weeks, and party wall procedures up to two months where neighbours are involved.
Procurement runs alongside: kitchens, sanitaryware, tiles, flooring and made-to-measure joinery routinely carry four to twelve week lead times, and these must be ordered before, not during, the build.
A realistic rule of thumb is to allow four to eight weeks of pre-construction for a flat and eight to sixteen weeks for a whole house, on top of the on-site programme. The projects that finish on time are almost always the ones that invested properly in this invisible phase.
What causes delays
Most refurbishment delays are not caused by slow trades; they are caused by a handful of recurring issues, and almost all of them are foreseeable.
Decisions are the biggest. Every choice left open when work starts, the tile not chosen, the kitchen not finalised, the bathroom layout still under debate, becomes a stop in the programme, because trades cannot proceed past an undecided point. Mid-project changes are worse still, since work often has to be undone and redone.
Consents and procedures cause front-loaded delays: a licence to alter not started early enough, a party wall award not in place, materials with long lead times ordered too late. Surprises cause mid-project delays: the rotten joist, the asbestos, the inadequate lintel, the hidden leak revealed at strip-out, each of which needs investigating, pricing and putting right.
Weather, access restrictions and the availability of specialist trades round out the list. None of these is exotic; all are familiar to an experienced contractor. The role of good project management is to anticipate them, order ahead, lock decisions early and hold a contingency in both budget and programme, so that a surprise becomes a known risk handled rather than a crisis that stops everything.
London-specific logistics that add time
Refurbishing in London carries logistical frictions that simply do not exist in much of the country, and they add real days to a programme if they are not planned for.
Parking and access top the list. Many central streets have no on-street parking for vans, requiring suspended bays at £40–£70 per bay per day arranged weeks in advance, or daily loading-only windows that limit when materials can arrive. No driveway and no loading bay means every delivery is a timed operation rather than a simple drop.
Waste is constrained too: skip permits for the public highway take time to arrange, some boroughs restrict skip placement entirely, and in those cases waste must be bagged and collected, which is slower. Scaffolding over a public footway needs a licence before it goes up.
Flats and mansion blocks add their own clock. Managed buildings commonly restrict noisy work to roughly 8am–5pm on weekdays with a complete weekend ban, removing the Saturday working that speeds a house project. Communal-area protection, booking the lift or the stairs, and notifying neighbours all consume time.
A contractor who has worked across London builds these realities into the programme from day one, which is precisely why a London timeline runs a little longer than the same job elsewhere.
How sequencing keeps a project on time
Two refurbishments of identical scope can finish weeks apart purely because of how the work is sequenced, and good sequencing is the quiet skill that separates a smooth project from a stalled one.
The principle is to keep the critical path moving and never leave a trade waiting. Disruptive, whole-property work, strip-out, first-fix electrics and plumbing, plastering, comes first and everywhere at once, so the dusty stages are done together rather than room by room. Finishes follow in a logical order so that no trade undoes another's work: tiling before second-fix, second-fix before decoration, decoration before flooring and final fix.
Long-lead items are ordered at the very start against the date they are needed, so the programme never pauses for a delivery. Inspections, building control visits, are booked ahead of the stage they check, not after it. And a single project manager holds the whole sequence, so that when one trade slips, the next is reorganised rather than left idle.
This is why a contractor running all trades in-house, as Apex London does, can compress a timeline a string of separate subcontractors cannot: the diary is one diary, and the next trade is already booked.
Setting a realistic schedule from the start
The schedule that holds is the one built honestly at the outset, with the awkward realities included rather than wished away. Here is how we set one.
We start from the on-site duration for the scope, then add the pre-construction period for design, consents and procurement, and a programme contingency of around 10–15% for the surprises that an old building reliably produces. We identify the long-lead items and order dates up front, and we flag any consent, a licence to alter, planning, a party wall award, that could become the critical path, so it is started first.
We then give you a programme with stages and milestones, not just a finish date, so progress is visible and any slippage is caught early rather than discovered at the end. And we are candid about the things outside our control: a freeholder's response time, a planning determination, a specialist material on back order.
The alternative, an optimistic single date with no contingency and no allowance for consents, is how projects acquire a reputation for overrunning. For a realistic, stage-by-stage programme for your refurbishment, call 020 3962 0455 and we will scope the time as carefully as the cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a full house refurbishment take in London?
A whole-house refurbishment typically takes three to six months on site, and five to nine months where structural work, a loft conversion or an extension is involved. On top of that, allow eight to sixteen weeks of pre-construction for design, consents and ordering long-lead materials.
How long does a bathroom refurbishment take?
A full bathroom refurbishment takes two to four weeks on site. A small room contains every trade, and tanking needs curing time while tiling cannot be rushed, so a fitter promising one week is usually planning to cut corners. Wetroom formation and layout changes add time.
How long does a flat refurbishment take?
A full flat refurbishment, with a new kitchen and bathroom, rewiring, replumbing, replastering and decoration, takes six to twelve weeks on site depending on size and specification, plus four to eight weeks of pre-construction. A licence to alter can extend the start date by up to several months.
What causes refurbishment delays?
The main causes are undecided choices and mid-project changes, consents started too late (licence to alter, planning, party wall), long-lead materials ordered late, and hidden surprises revealed at strip-out such as rotten joists, asbestos or leaks. London logistics, parking, skip permits, restricted working hours in blocks, add further time.
Why do London refurbishments take longer than elsewhere?
London adds logistical friction: suspended parking bays arranged weeks ahead, restricted delivery windows, skip permits and scaffold licences, and managed blocks that limit noisy work to weekday daytime hours with no weekend working. These realities, planned for by an experienced contractor, add days to a programme that would run faster in much of the country.
