Full house renovation in Luxembourg for homes and apartments

Full house renovation in Luxembourg: what it means at Terrexo

On a full house renovation in Luxembourg, one contract covers strip-out, services, partitions, floors, joinery and painting. The homeowner keeps one contact, one programme and one invoice, and the site manager takes responsibility for the whole site through to handover.

We work on single-family houses, terraced houses and apartments, across Luxembourg. For real orders of magnitude, from projects published in our case studies: 90 m² in Limpertsberg in six weeks, 380 m² in Walferdange in thirty-two, 420 m² in Bridel in forty-eight. A 200 m² house in Sandweiler sits between them.

What the quote contains for your renovation in Luxembourg

Strip-out and removal by skip with waste sorting. Full electrics brought up to standard, consumer unit included. Plumbing and waste runs. Partitions and plastering, with dropped ceilings where services have to be routed. Interior joinery and doors. Tiling, parquet, laminate or a poured floor. Paint and finishes.

Structural work is priced separately, and so is anything that touches the roof or the façade: those items depend on a survey and, for the structure, on a structural engineer. Taking out a load-bearing wall, a steel beam, a slab — none of that can be read off a photograph.

Every line carries its quantity and its price. That is what makes two quotes comparable, and it is also what lets an item come out without the whole thing being re-priced.

House, terraced house, apartment: differences when renovating

In a single-family house the question is phasing. A lot of projects run with the family still in the house, room by room, with a temporary kitchen. It works, it takes longer, and it is decided at quote stage rather than halfway through.

In a terraced house it is the neighbours on either side: access, noise, protecting shared areas, working hours set by the commune's regulations. None of it is unmanageable, but it belongs in the plan instead of being discovered in week one.

In an apartment the syndic, the managing agent, becomes part of the project. Consent from the co-owners' association, booking the lift or the goods hoist, protecting the stairwells, getting rubble out. Those points, more than the technical ones, are what move an apartment programme.

Autorisation de bâtir, 3 % housing VAT and renovation grants

An interior renovation that changes neither the load-bearing structure, nor the façade, nor the roof generally needs no autorisation de bâtir — and it is exactly the case in which using an architect is not compulsory. As soon as a load-bearing wall, an opening in the façade, the volume or the use of the building changes, the application goes to the commune, with plans drawn by an architect or a consulting engineer registered with the OAI, and it has to comply with the plan d'aménagement général, the applicable PAP and the building regulations.

On a principal residence completed at least ten years ago, the work may fall under the 3 % TVA logement rate rather than 17 %, capped at €50,000 of VAT per dwelling. Authorisation from the AED is applied for before work starts; applied for afterwards, it follows a different procedure and a different timescale.

The energy portion — insulation, replacing windows, heating — comes under the Klimabonus scheme administered by Klima-Agence. Conditions and amounts are checked measure by measure, during pricing rather than after signature.

How a home renovation programme runs in Luxembourg

Visit and survey, detailed quote within ten to fifteen days, then, in this order: strip-out and demolition, services, partitions and plastering, screeds and floors, joinery, paint, clean and handover.

That order is the first cause of slippage when it is not held. Tiling laid before the electrics are finished gets cut back into; paint done before the joinery is fitted gets redone. Allow two to ten weeks for an apartment or a complete floor, longer as soon as the structure moves. The lead time on made-to-measure joinery is often the real critical path.