What Does Flooring a Three Bedroom House Cost?
A room by room budget for flooring a Kent three bedroom house, with realistic totals for budget, mid range and premium specifications and where to spend first.
Flooring a whole house is one of the few jobs where the total is much easier to get wrong than the individual rooms. People price the lounge accurately, guess the rest and then find the stairs and landing alone account for a fifth of the budget.
This guide breaks a typical Kent three bedroom semi into its rooms, gives realistic installed figures for each, and shows how three different specifications add up. The floor areas used are close to what we measure week in, week out across Medway and Maidstone.
The rooms and the areas we usually find
| Area | Typical size | Usual choice |
|---|---|---|
| Lounge | 16 to 20 m2 | Carpet or LVT |
| Kitchen and diner | 12 to 18 m2 | LVT or vinyl |
| Hallway | 5 to 8 m2 | LVT or hard-wearing carpet |
| Stairs and landing | 13 to 16 steps plus 6 to 9 m2 | Carpet |
| Main bedroom | 12 to 15 m2 | Carpet |
| Second bedroom | 10 to 12 m2 | Carpet |
| Third bedroom | 6 to 9 m2 | Carpet |
| Bathroom | 4 to 6 m2 | Sheet vinyl or safety vinyl |
Three realistic whole-house budgets
A budget specification, using a serviceable polypropylene carpet upstairs and a mid-weight laminate downstairs, generally lands between £3,200 and £4,200 installed for the whole house including uplift.
A mid-range specification, with an eighty twenty carpet upstairs on a good crumb rubber underlay and click LVT downstairs, usually runs from £5,000 to £7,000. This is the most common choice among the families we quote for, because it survives ordinary life for a decade or more.
A premium specification, with wool carpet, glue-down LVT and engineered wood in the lounge, typically starts around £9,000 and rises with preparation. At this level the subfloor work is a bigger share of the bill, because the products are less forgiving.
Why stairs cost more than the area suggests
A flight of thirteen steps is around four square metres of carpet but takes as long to fit as a large bedroom. Every riser and tread has to be cut, tucked and secured, winders take longer again, and the material has to run in one direction so the waste is higher than a rectangular room.
Expect stairs to be priced per step or per flight rather than by area. It is normal for a staircase and landing to cost as much as the main bedroom, and that is a fair reflection of the work involved rather than an upsell.
Phasing the job without paying twice
- Do all the hard floor downstairs in one visit, because setting out and preparation are shared across the rooms
- Do stairs, landing and bedrooms together, so the carpet runs from the same batch and the join at the top of the stairs matches
- Avoid splitting a single open-plan area across two visits, because dye lots and levels rarely match exactly
- If money is tight, delay the smallest bedroom rather than the hallway, which takes the most wear
Where whole-house budgets usually go over
Three things account for most overruns. Chipboard floors upstairs that have been lifted by a plumber and never properly re-screwed, solid floors downstairs that need latex once the old floor comes up, and doors that will not clear a thicker floor and need trimming or rehanging.
None of these is expensive on its own, but together they can add several hundred pounds to a job priced without a survey. That is precisely why a measured visit before quoting is worth the hour it takes.
Getting the order of work right
Flooring goes in after decorating and after the kitchen, but before skirting is finally painted if you can manage it. Fitting last protects the floor from paint and plaster, and it means the fitter measures the room as it will finally be, not as it was before the units went in.
If a bathroom is being replaced, the vinyl goes in after the suite is set but before the final seal, so the sheet runs under the units and there is no exposed edge for water to get behind.
What to spend first if you cannot do it all at once
If the whole house is not affordable in one go, the order that gives you most for the money is hallway and stairs first, then the main living space, then bedrooms. The hallway and stairs take the heaviest traffic and are the first thing anyone sees, and they are the areas where an old floor makes an otherwise smart house feel neglected.
Bedrooms can wait comfortably. They take a fraction of the wear, they are private, and a tired bedroom carpet costs you nothing but appearance. Doing them last also means the room you have most recently decorated gets the newest floor.
One caveat: if you plan to use the same carpet on stairs, landing and bedrooms, do them together. Dye lots change between production runs and a join between two batches of the same carpet at the top of the stairs is usually visible in daylight.
Frequently asked questions
- How long does a whole house take to fit?
- Two to four working days for a typical three bedroom house, longer if latex screed needs to cure between preparation and fitting.
- Should I use the same carpet throughout upstairs?
- It usually looks better and costs less than mixing, because the material runs from one roll and there is less waste at the joins.
- Can you fit around furniture?
- In bedrooms we can work room by room and move furniture as we go. Open-plan downstairs areas need to be clear for the day.
- Do I need to remove skirting boards?
- No. Carpet tucks against the skirting and hard floors are finished with a scotia or beading, so the skirting stays in place.
Keep reading
Realistic installed costs for carpet, LVT, laminate, vinyl and wood in Kent homes, including underlay, preparation, uplift and the extras quotes often hide.
A plain-English breakdown of what goes into a per-m² flooring price, with guide-only UK cost bands for materials, fitting and extras.
Realistic timings for carpet, LVT, laminate and vinyl fitting, including subfloor drying times, stairs, whole houses and what delays a job on the day.
See how we survey, prepare and fit carpet across Kent.
See how we survey, prepare and fit LVT across Kent.
Talk it through with a fitter, not a call centre
Book a free measure from our Gillingham warehouse and we will bring samples of the options discussed here, check the subfloor and leave you with a written quote you can hold us to.