A renovation budget is decided before anyone is on site

Ask what a renovation in Jávea costs and the useful answer is another question: which renovation. The same house can be re-tiled and re-painted, or opened up, insulated, re-serviced and re-levelled, and the two jobs share nothing but an address. So what follows is a shape: how the money divides, and which decisions have fixed it before a builder arrives.

A renovation budget is decided long before it is spent, by choices that look architectural on paper. Whether the envelope is opened, whether the structure is touched, whether the wet rooms move, whether the floor levels change. Each is a threshold rather than a slope. A bathroom refitted where it stands and the same one moved across a wall are different projects, with different drawings, different trades, and possibly a different route through the town hall.

Behind the plaster

Buyers often arrive with a budget already divided, and it is divided by what has photographs. Kitchen, floors, bathrooms, taps, joinery. Those items have showrooms, so they feel like the budget. They are also the part you can still change late, which is another way of saying they decide nothing.

The other lines go where nobody will look again. Chasing walls and making them good. Re-wiring and re-plumbing a house whose services were sized for a different way of living. Drainage falls, membranes, waterproofing, the sub-base under a floor. Scaffolding, protection, and carrying away what demolition produces. That last is charged in more than one way, which is enough to make two quotations look further apart than they are.

Coastal houses add an entry of their own. Take the render off a balcony nose and you find out what the sea air has been doing to the reinforcement inside. How far it has travelled cannot be known from outside. That line stays open until it is opened. Where a quotation carries a firm price against it, ask what the figure rests on and what happens if there is more.

Order matters as much as amount. A tap can be changed at the end. A fall, a threshold height or the run of a soil pipe cannot, except by taking the floor up again.

Paper before people

The second underestimated line has no materials in it. Spanish municipalities treat a small job differently from a large one. Which side of that line a project falls on decides what the town hall wants to see before anything starts. Where the line runs is a local matter. Establish it with an architect or an arquitecto técnico before you accept an offer, because it can change what the offer should have contained.

Past a certain size a project draws in more people than the trades: a technical project and its drawings, structural calculations, site supervision, health and safety, a plan for the demolition waste. Which of those attach to yours is a question, not a given. Each is also a fee, and fees behave differently by how they are set. One tied to the declared cost of the works grows when the scope grows; a fixed one does not.

Then there is what the town hall charges in connection with a licence, and how tax falls on building work. One is set municipally. The other turns on the nature of the work and on who carries it out, which is why two quotations can both be honest and still not be comparable. Read the basis before you read the totals.

Time is a line as well. A house you cannot yet use still costs money to hold, and a delay that pushes the wet trades into high summer costs the season with it.

The outside as the reserve

The exterior tends to be drawn last, priced last and built last, which makes it the easiest thing to defer. So it becomes the contingency: when the invisible work runs over, the terrace, the lighting and the planting give way. On this coast that is the wrong end to economise. Outside is where the house is used.

A terrace is not paving. It is a sub-base, falls, drainage, movement joints and waterproofing wherever there is a room underneath. The shape of a pool is the last part of a pool. Ahead of it come excavation, structure, plant, water treatment, electrics, and a way to get water and power down there. A sloping plot brings retaining walls, and those bring engineering and drainage behind them. Then gates, irrigation, lighting, and planting that looks like nothing on the day it goes in.

Access is a cost of its own on a steep plot, and whatever has to be dug should be dug while a machine can still reach it. If the outside has to be phased, phase it deliberately: services and drainage now, surfaces later. Lifting a finished terrace to lay a cable is the expensive version of the same job.

An allowance is not a price

The last distinction is the easiest to miss, because the two lines look identical on the page. One is a price: a defined scope, a measured quantity, a named product. The other is an allowance, a sum held in the total against something not yet decided.

Allowances are not dishonest. They are the right way to hold open a decision that genuinely is open. But a budget largely built from them is a forecast, and a forecast is what people remember as a price.

Telling them apart takes three questions. What does the figure cover, supply only or supply and fit: an allowance for tiles that excludes adhesive, levelling, cutting and laying is not an allowance for a floor. Is the quantity measured or estimated. And when the chosen item costs more than the sum held, who decides, and out of whose money.

Then keep a reserve, and keep it for the invisible work rather than the kitchen. The entries that move are usually the ones nobody can see, and they tend to move early, while there is still a whole house left to spend on.

Rocksure prices the renovation before buying the house, on the assumption that whatever is behind the plaster will have to be paid for either way. It makes the beginning slower. It also moves the arguments to the point where they are still cheap to have.