Renovation Notes exists to answer one question honestly: how does this actually work? Most renovation advice online is published by companies that want to sell you the very thing they are writing about. This is not that.

Who writes it

Renovation Notes was founded by Gediz Karaca, who edits it and leads the desk. His bio is at the foot of this page. The notes themselves are drawn from years of accumulated working notes kept by a team of subject matter experts across UK and European construction.

Gediz is a second generation construction professional who spent a decade in mega-project construction management, leading the development of over $1bn of assets. Across the team we have worked alongside more than 100 of the largest international contractors, specialist contractors and subject matter experts. That is the experience the library is built on: not commentary about construction, but the judgement that comes from pricing it, sequencing it and seeing it through on site.

That experience spans the full built environment:

  • Residential, skyscrapers, high-rise and apartment buildings, and detached, semi-detached and terraced houses.
  • Commercial, shopping malls, offices, retail units and warehouses.
  • Industrial, large complexes such as chemical plants.
  • Infrastructure, bridges, underground and metro systems, water-distribution networks, airports and more.

That breadth, sequencing, costs, building control and structure, is exactly where most homeowners get caught out, and it is where we can give you a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.

How these notes are made

Every note starts from questions we have received over many years of our operational experience.

The first pass: drafting

We fed years of our own construction notes into specialised AI agents that organise that material and draft a first pass. We then spawn research agents to deepen the knowledge base on the topic and cover the weak points a first draft always leaves behind. Running alongside them are compliance and consistency agents we developed internally, which keep the whole knowledge base aligned: the same figure, the same rule and the same jurisdiction wherever they appear across several hundred notes.

The second pass: references

The second pass is done against reputable references.

Across years of our internal construction practice we learned how to build a reference that is defensible and acceptable: on a real project, a figure you cannot attribute to a body with standing is a figure you cannot rely on. We applied those lessons to build one of the most extensive reference bases in UK construction, and we publish it openly so you can judge it for yourself. It is organised in tiers by the standing of the body that published the source:

  • Tier 1, national legislation, government and regulators. Acts and statutory instruments on legislation.gov.uk, the Approved Documents, the Planning Portal, HSE, ONS, HMRC, Ofgem, Historic England, and the devolved equivalents for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Tier 1 also separates national sources from local authority ones, because a council speaks only for its own district and can never be the authority for a national rule.
  • Tier 2, accreditation, professional and standards bodies. BSI and the British Standards themselves, BRE, NHBC, RICS, RIBA, IStructE, ICE, CIBSE, UKAS, and the competent person schemes such as Gas Safe, NICEIC, FENSA and MCS.
  • Tier 3, trade federations and associations. The bodies that write the practice guidance a trade actually works to, such as the NFRC, the FMB, the Glass and Glazing Federation, TRADA and the Mineral Products Association.
  • Tier 4, established consumer bodies, charities, utilities and universities. Which?, Citizens Advice, the HomeOwners Alliance, Shelter, MoneyHelper, Electrical Safety First, the Energy Saving Trust, the electricity and gas network operators, the water companies, and university building research. We accept these for costs and general facts, never for a regulation or a standard.
  • Manufacturer product data, accepted only for a product specification and never for a rule. A maker is the authority on its own board’s lambda value, its own lintel’s safe working load or its own boiler’s output. It is not an authority on what the regulations require.

Our internal database currently holds 1,684 sources: 458 at Tier 1, 349 at Tier 2, 131 at Tier 3, 222 at Tier 4 and 505 manufacturer specifications. The product layer is deliberately the largest, because “which board, what thickness, what performance” is the question behind most renovation decisions, and it is the one place where the manufacturer genuinely is the best available source.

We publish the portion relevant to the notes we have released, currently 279 sources, in our open references library. The rest is the working bench the notes are written from, and we extend it continuously.

The third pass: automated validation

We further run automated processes that check the validity of the notes. They run every night across the whole library and look for figures that have drifted out of date, for British Standards that have been withdrawn or superseded since we cited them, for links that no longer resolve, and for rules that apply in England being written as though they apply across the UK. When a figure turns out to be wrong we correct it everywhere it appears, not only in the note where we found it.

Costs: day rates and productivity

Alongside the references we keep a separate internal database of day rates and productivity rates across a wide range of scenarios, built from decades of our own practice: what a given gang actually achieves in a day, on a real site, under real conditions. It is what gives us confidence in our estimating, and it is the yardstick a published cost figure is measured against before it goes out.

Sign-off

The curator engineer named on a note applies their own judgement and that private database as a final filter, then signs the note off to the best of their knowledge. Their name and credentials are on this page.

Why we do this

Honestly, it started as a hobby. We are constantly asked about residential renovation projects, so we decided to pool our notes and make them public, free for anyone to use. There is nothing to buy here; if a note saves you a costly mistake, that is the whole point.

If you find it useful, please spread the word so more people can benefit from these notes.

Our promise

  • Impartial. We document and compare; we do not sell.
  • UK-focused. Planning, regs and costs are written for the UK and kept current.
  • Sourced. If we state a figure, we tell you which body published it.
  • Corrected in public. When we get something wrong, we fix it across the library and the note’s revision date changes.
  • Plain English. Technical where it matters, never jargon for its own sake.

Important

Our notes are for general information only and are not a substitute for professional advice tailored to your project. Please read our full disclaimer.

Need a professional?

We do not sell services. But if you want professional advice or hands-on help with your project, we are happy to refer you to trusted people we work with. Fill in the form below and we will point the right person your way.