Apartment renovation in Berlin

A full flat renovation isn’t a big version of a small job. It’s a sequencing problem. The individual trades are mostly routine — what goes wrong is the order they happen in, the decisions nobody made in time, and the fact that nobody owned the whole thing.

That’s the part I do. Planning, ordering, sequencing and the work itself, with the two or three things I don’t cover brought in and worked around.

What’s included

Survey and planning. A programme saying what happens in what order. Strip-out and disposal. Walls built and taken out. First-fix electrics throughout. Substrate, floor and ceiling work. Bathroom and kitchen as complete sub-projects, including fitting the sanitaryware and plumbing in the sink where the connections stay put. Tiling. Flooring. Plastering and decorating. Second fix and finishing. Making good, cleaning and handover.

Plus the coordination: getting a plumber in at first fix if the pipework or drainage is moving, rather than after the walls are shut. Getting a structural engineer to look at a wall before anyone commits to taking it out. And keeping suppliers and deliveries matched to the programme instead of to whenever somebody remembered to order.

How the job actually runs

Sequence is everything.

1. Survey and plan. What the flat is, what you want, and what the building will let you do. This is where we have the straight conversation about budget.
2. Decisions. Sanitaryware, tiles, kitchen, flooring, socket positions, lighting. As many nailed down now as possible. Every decision you put off is one that stops the job later.
3. Strip out. The whole flat back to whatever’s being kept. This is when the building tells you what it’s really got.
4. Structural and layout. Walls out and in, openings formed, with an engineer wherever load is involved.
5. First fix. Electrics while everything’s open, and any pipework that’s moving goes in at the same time. Point of no cheap return.
6. Substrates. Floors levelled, walls prepped, ceilings sorted. Unglamorous and decisive.
7. Wet rooms. Tanking and tiling in the bathroom and kitchen.
8. Second fix. Kitchen, sanitaryware, electrical accessories, doors and joinery.
9. Decorating and floor finishes, in that order.
10. Snag, make good, clean, hand over.

Berlin flats, and what a hundred years does

Every Altbau renovation turns something up. Walls out of plumb and floors out of level, far enough that you design around them rather than correcting everywhere. Sand or rubble fill between the floor joists. Lime plaster patched with gypsum by somebody in a hurry. Circuits with no earth. A bathroom obviously shoved into a space in the 1960s that was never meant to be one. Chimney flues running through walls exactly where you don’t want them.

Then the constraints that aren’t physical. Most Hausordnungen limit noisy work to certain hours and rule out Sundays completely, which shapes the whole programme. Access matters more than people think — a fourth-floor flat with no lift adds time to every delivery and every load of waste. And if the building is listed or in a conservation area, the windows and the facade come with rules attached.

Plattenbau flats are the opposite: consistent and predictable dimensionally, but panel construction limits what you can cut, and the services sit in fixed positions that cost real money to move.

None of that is a reason not to renovate. It’s a reason to survey properly and hold a contingency.

How long it takes

Broad guide: a full renovation of a typical two- or three-room Berlin flat runs eight to sixteen weeks on site, depending on scope, what turns up, and how fast decisions come back from you. A cosmetic refresh across a whole flat is much shorter, often two to four weeks. Moving a bathroom or kitchen, or taking out a structural wall, pushes you towards the top of that range and past it.

Long-lead items are the usual hidden delay — made-to-measure worktops, particular tiles, and anything coming from outside Germany.

What moves the price

• Scope. Whether the layout changes at all is the single biggest question.
• Condition. What the strip-out reveals, which is why holding a contingency isn’t pessimism.
• Services. How much of the electrical installation has to be renewed rather than extended.
• Wet rooms. Bathrooms and kitchens are the highest cost per square metre in any flat, and moving either one brings a plumber into the programme.
• Access. Floor, lift, stair width, and where a skip can legally stand.
• Specification. Your choices on tile, sanitaryware, kitchen and flooring can swing the total enormously without changing my labour much at all.
• Occupied or empty. Empty is faster, cheaper and better.

Send me the floor plan if you’ve got one, photos of each room, and a sentence about what you want the flat to be. That’s enough for a first proper conversation.