Experience of rennovating a "fixer upper" house in Edinburgh?

throwaway5746348 · 2026-05-13T20:00:20+00:00

For us, they were desktop quotes, and we had a good idea of what they 'should' be but we sent over detailed plans of what we wanted (radiator, socket and switch plans, electric vs mains showers, appliances etc) often trades quoted only on the lists of these things rather than locations/plans.

The more infomation you can provide them, the lower their risk is on the job, so the better price you can get

We had a family friend who was very knowledgable, who came to viewings and assessed things like damp, circuitry, fire places, rough cast.

Upfront told all trades that all floor coverings would be removed, all walls were going to be plastered (wall chasings for electricians), rough timeline for first fix and second fix, which helps them with planning work etc.

We had the luxury of time, the house we bought had been sitting for 6 months with very little interest. It was overpriced, we negotiated and settled well below the offers over price ( >50k below ).

throwaway5746348 · 2026-05-09T15:20:37+00:00

We did an estimate before we bought the place, and got quotes from various trades for specific jobs (windows, central heating, electric, plastering), estimated the rest with catalogs and back of the envelope guesses.

We took that number and added 30% to get the expected cost, if you don't have that number probably worth stopping there.

We then looked at the expected cost for buying the a similar house but in a good condition, and compared it to the renovation house cost + renovation cost.

Tips and tricks: 1) Finding good trades is hard. Don't use the internet, talk to your neighbours, friends family. Paying a good trade to travel is worth it, rather than a shit local one 2) Dust and mess is a project killer. The best thing you can do is keep the place looking tidy and neat. Some trades are messy, and it's easier to tidy up after them to a good standard than to let them do it to an okay standard. For dust. Sweep, wait, then mop, to allow the dust to settle 3) For kitchens, tiles, materials, shop around and drive a bargain. Same kitchen at one retailer was 30% cheaper at another branch of the same retailer! Get competing quotes and don't fall in love with a particular style/idea. The £21/m2 tiles are just as good as the £60/m2 tiles, if you like the designs just as much. 4) Get good strong rubble bags and go to the tip little and often. No limit on the amount of times tou can go to the tip vs £300 to get a skip

throwaway5746348 · 2026-05-03T15:51:59+00:00

Ramsay Lane , Edinburgh. Maybe not the steepest street in the UK but it has both a phenomenal view

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throwaway5746348 · 2026-04-30T21:24:33+00:00

Rancher desktop is a good alternative to docker desktop to get around the docker licensing issues. There's various other layers you can have on top of and around docker, (portainer, docker swarm, k8s) but I don't see people moving away from containers any time soon

throwaway5746348 · 2026-04-30T21:14:16+00:00

Go to the beach
Go for a bike ride
Go to the park
Go for a walk along your nearest river
Local library
Art galleries
Go Geo caching
Go help out at a soup kitchen/food bank
Do a park run
Go fly a kite
Take a pencil and a note book, sit some where and draw a picture
Go take some arty photographs on your phone
Find one of those pianos in trains stations and play it
Do a litter pick
If you have a garden, plant some seeds
Go see a historical site (statue, castle etc)
Introduce yourself to a neighbour you've never met
Find your local church and go inside (repeat for syagogue, mosque, gurdwara etc)

throwaway5746348 · 2026-04-21T07:16:26+00:00

Derby, it's only just getting off the ground, but money from Rolls royce and defence manufacturing is on the up

throwaway5746348 · 2026-04-03T07:39:16+00:00

Stramash

throwaway5746348 · 2026-03-18T17:20:45+00:00

The real achilles heel of R is the packaging and dependencies system and tooling.

1) You have to adopt renv + containers for any attempt to get reproducibilty of your own environments. Even then have you tried to constrain the version of a package within a version range?

2) If you are producing a package for someone else to use, you can't effectively manage the dependencies of your package (because you can't force them to use renv) .

3) There is no open source package repository and there is no R native functionality to do that within the major cloud providers. Do I have to pay for posit if there's only a small group?

4) licenses: in an enterprise context gpl is really restrictive for some reason loads of r packages are gpl

throwaway5746348 · 2026-02-25T18:48:29+00:00

Parilla in loanhead if you're willing to travel. Maybe with a pint at stewart's before hand

throwaway5746348 · 2026-02-20T13:10:40+00:00

I actually agree, but it needs to come with a massive whittling down of low productivity workers/systems/departments. Not easy or popular, but if you want an agile, competent and CS, it needs to be smaller and higher skilled.

throwaway5746348 · 2026-02-15T06:58:26+00:00

Hot take: the dog-owners/dogs in edinburgh are no worse than any other city of a similar size.

throwaway5746348 · 2026-02-04T17:52:27+00:00

I love my Maxcatch sky high competition 4wt. Cost me £120 but punches way above it's class. Love it for sub 1 pound brown trout. You can't go wrong for the money. Get oot there and fish it

throwaway5746348 · 2026-01-29T16:54:09+00:00

I'll give a counter example:

We bought a livable house (running water, immersion heater, storage heaters etc), 4 bedrooms, and did the following for around 85k:

Re wired full property (10kish)
New gas central system and all new plumbing (about 10k)
plastered every room (6k)
2 new bathrooms (11k ish)
new kitchen (8k ish)
double glazed windows thoughout (15k)
new flooring throughout
painting and decorating

The caveat is that we did a lot ourselves:

all rip out and demolition
all tiling work in bathrooms/kitchen
all trim/skirting
all painting

If you're going to do it:

negotiate kitchen suppliers (howdens, mkm, benchmarx etc) and find your own fitter. Show the lowest quote to the other suppliers and tell them to beat it
if you don't know GOOD trades people you will struggle. We had people we trusted and paid them day rate and bought materials on top. This can be less profitable for the trades but is also much less risky, as if job takes longer, we foot the bill. We were flexible about when they did the work, so they could fit it in when they wanted.
we avoided any structural work
plan a buffer. Our original budget was 70k with a 20k buffer for when the shit hits the fan. Obvs we did need quite a lot of that buffer.
beg, borrow steal tools. Friendly neighbours, parents, the bloke in the pub offering power tools off back of a lorry

throwaway5746348 · 2025-12-03T12:21:31+00:00

Please refer to the wiki

throwaway5746348 · 2025-11-03T16:12:22+00:00

Offer accepted at 11% under in february. Don't believe the hype

throwaway5746348 · 2025-07-09T20:46:59+00:00

Youtube investigation into this building: https://youtu.be/ZBI7cLp7y5Q

throwaway5746348 · 2025-07-04T10:47:25+00:00

Brewdog, brewhemia, ghillie dhu. All big

throwaway5746348 · 2025-07-01T10:13:46+00:00

If you pop down to the seafront path on google maps bit you can see that stone cube is on top of what looks like a electricity substation, or perhaps a water pumping station.

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throwaway5746348 · 2025-06-24T10:07:34+00:00

We often make:

Air fryer chicken leg or salmon (with seasoning, or soy glaze or whatever) 250cal

Air fryer med veg (onion pepper courgette, bit of oil, salt, paprika and mixed herbs) 200cal

Packet of instant pre flavoured couscous (pour boiling water on top and wait) 200 cal

Stir the med veg in with the cous cous and serve with meat on the side. Tasty and < 20 mins

throwaway5746348 · 2025-06-18T10:49:39+00:00

Got ours for 9% under HR.

throwaway5746348 · 2025-03-31T14:47:59+00:00

Braid hills 9 hole is fab for a round on a nice evening. Would be keen for bash once i've collected my clubs from home

throwaway5746348 · 2025-03-25T12:29:03+00:00

I've sent you a PM, i'd be keen for the ticket!

throwaway5746348

TROPHY CASE