17 UK home and renovation blogs worth reading
If you are about to start work on your house, the most useful reading is rarely a brand’s advice page. It is someone who has already done the job, written up the bit that went wrong, and named the paint, the spec or the price they actually paid. This is a reading list of blogs like that: 17 of them, every one opened and read before being described here.
The disclosure, up front. Costwise is a cost-guide site. We publish price ranges for building and home-improvement work, and we make money when a reader asks to be matched with an installer. We have also contacted a number of home and renovation bloggers this year, asking for cost data or for a link. Some said yes, some said no, and some quoted us a fee. None of that had any bearing on who is in this list. Several blogs here have never linked to us and never will. A couple turned us down. They are here because they are good.
There is nothing to claim and nothing to display. No badge, no embed code, no “as featured on” graphic, and we are not asking anyone to link back.
How the list was chosen
We looked at 50 sites and kept 17. Every entry was read rather than skimmed from a search snippet, and every description comes from posts we actually opened. Every author name is the one published on the blog itself. Where we could not establish who writes a site, we left it out rather than guess.
- Dormant sites are out. Nothing published in roughly the last twelve months. A few genuinely good DIY archives fell here, including one written by a published Haynes manual author whose blog stopped in 2014.
- Not really a blog. News sites, trade bodies, forums, retailer content marketing, and cost-guide sites competing with us.
- Paid-link inventory is out, and this took out more sites than everything else combined. The pattern is easy to spot once you have seen it: batches of posts published minutes apart on unrelated topics, each carrying one followed link to a commercial site, with no disclosure. A blog whose home section is mostly bought placements cannot honestly be recommended to someone about to spend £20,000, because the reader has no way of knowing which recommendation is genuine.
- Every link here was loaded on the day we published, and anything a browser balks at is out however good the writing. Two blogs we would otherwise have listed are held back for that reason alone: one had a security certificate expire days earlier, the other stopped answering. We would rather leave a good site out for a fortnight than send you to an error page, and both go in as soon as they are fixed.
- No scores and no rankings. There are no domain-authority columns and no traffic estimates here. Anything numeric would either be invented or a vendor metric that tells you nothing about whether a blog is good. Entries are grouped by subject and listed alphabetically within each group.
We have not named the sites we left out. The point of this page is the 17 that are worth your time. Most are in England, with one in North Wales, one in Co Down and one on the Isle of Man, and one couple whose current project is in the Netherlands although they write in pounds for a UK audience. Where an entry comes with a caveat, it is stated in the entry.
Renovation diaries
One house, documented over years, by the people living in it. Read these for the order things happen in and what a project actually feels like from the inside.
Fifi McGee
Fi is an interior designer and the site grew out of documenting their own 1930s semi, bought in 2016, before turning towards first-time renovators. Posts split between practical planning guidance, on kitchen layouts, paint, engineered wood against LVT and what a renovation costs in 2026, and long write-ups of real client projects organised by house type, from Georgian and Victorian terraces to mid-century and 1950s houses.
Worth readingThe Reno Club Spotlight series, which walks through named client renovations in detail, and the posts that go straight at money and contractor conflict rather than styling: “The contractor tried to overcharge by £50K” and “They quoted us £20,000 for a bathroom, we did it for £3K”.
From Evija with Love
Evija has been documenting the slow, mostly DIY renovation of the 1930s house she shares with her husband Shaun, one room at a time: bathroom demolition and relayout, the kitchen from planning through to cabinet hardware, architraves and skirting, the fireplace and log burner, the staircase, the sitting room. Useful if you are doing the work yourself over years rather than hiring one contractor for a single push, because she covers the preparation and the decisions as well as the reveal.
Worth knowing: The Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency, so anything jurisdictional such as building regulations does not transfer. The technique does, and the money is sterling.
Worth readingThe staircase makeover, published in two parts with the preparation work given its own post instead of skipping to the finished photo. The same instinct shows in “15 things no one tells you about a home renovation” and a straight technique post on getting a crisp line with painter’s tape.
DIY and how-to
For deciding what you can realistically do yourself before you pay a trade. These show the sequence, the tools and the fixings.
Claire Douglas Styling
Claire is a DIY and interiors writer who has been renovating her own three-bed detached house for close to a decade, and the site is built around doing the work yourself on a tight budget: cabinet painting, microcement worktops, wall panelling, IKEA-hack built-ins, skimming, skirting, resin paths.
Worth knowing: Recent output leans heavily into London hotel and restaurant reviews, so the home content sits in the archive and the DIY hub rather than on the front page.
Worth readingThe multi-part DIY kitchen makeover series, which goes step by step through painting and rehandling the existing cabinets, microcementing the worktops, closing the gap above the units and building a fridge surround, instead of replacing the kitchen.
Lackan Cottage Farm
A record of an off-grid smallholding focused on natural building: strawbale infill, hemp-lime plaster, sheepswool and woodfibre insulation, reciprocal-frame roundhouses, green roofs, plus wind and solar generation and compost toilets. Useful if you are weighing low-embodied-energy materials for a self-build or renovation in a wet climate and want to know how they hold up over a decade rather than how they photograph on completion day.
Worth knowing: Posting is sporadic, and there was a long gap before it resumed in 2026.
Worth readingThe natural building index, which catalogues eight completed structures with the materials named, and reports the failures too. The 2026 polytunnel post explains that the original untreated timber frame decomposed and gave up after more than ten years, so they have rebuilt with treated timber and aluminium base rails, conceding that age has hardened them about chemical treatments.
Little House On The Corner
A DIY and home improvement blog by a couple who started out renovating an Edwardian house in Manchester, moved on to an art deco flat in Berlin, and are now working through a much bigger house near Amsterdam. It is written in UK English and prices things in pounds, and the strength is step-by-step tutorials for jobs a homeowner can genuinely do.
Worth knowing: The current project is in the Netherlands, so labour costs, regulations and trades advice are not UK-specific. Some posts are paid collaborations, and they are clearly labelled in capitals at the top of the post.
Worth readingThe floor sanding coverage, which pairs a full guide on sanding wooden floors and floorboards with a separate post on the seven biggest floor sanding mistakes, both written from having sanded their own original boards. The panelling guide and the tutorial on painting laminate kitchen cabinets are in the same vein.
The Carpenter’s Daughter
Vikkie documents jobs she has done herself with her own step-by-step photos and a matching build video on most posts, covering second-fix carpentry such as skirting, architrave, hanging doors and laminate beading, plus plasterboarding and taping, loft work and garden builds.
Worth knowing: The least recently updated blog on this list, and it rarely quotes prices, so treat it as a capability check rather than a costing tool.
Worth readingSeveral garden projects come with free downloadable plans, including the cold frame greenhouse, the hinged hoop house for a raised bed and the potting bench with sink. The carpentry guides go to trade-level detail, such as fixing skirting into plasterboard against brick with rawl plugs, and never nailing or drilling directly beneath a socket.
Interiors and styling
For the decisions that come after the building work: colour, materials, lighting, furniture, and what the individual pieces cost.
Melanie Lissack Interiors
A first-person interiors, decorating and DIY blog running since 2016, mixing hands-on project write-ups with paint-colour round-ups that name specific shades and brands. Useful if you are choosing colours or tackling a decorating or garden-room job yourself and want to see exactly what someone used and how they did it, though she names products far more often than prices.
Worth reading“Small Garden Room Makeover: How I Transformed My Outbuilding Step-By-Step”, which walks through seven stages on a 9ft by 9ft outbuilding, from scaffold-board shelving and a hemmed fabric skirt to DIY window planters and bespoke MDF trim, naming the paints she used, Little Greene “Garden” and “Lute”, and the curtain track she cut down to fit.
Secret Home Designer
A qualified interior designer documents the room-by-room redecoration of her own 120-year-old Victorian house, alongside mood boards costed out item by item against real retailers including John Lewis, Dunelm and Cult Furniture. Useful if you know roughly what you want a room to feel like but not what the individual pieces cost or what order the work goes in.
Worth readingThe weekly “Tuesday Tips” posts, which answer one narrow decorating question at a time, such as what size rug to use, what time of day to judge a paint colour, and whether your budget is realistic before you start. The cost breakdown posts put a price against every item in a scheme, plus a total.
The Design Sheppard
An interiors and design blog running since 2009, written by a freelance design journalist who came to it from a staff-writer job on Designer Kitchen & Bathroom magazine. Useful if you are making decisions about materials, colour, lighting and furniture rather than costing structural work: posts are things like choosing a colour for painted floorboards, using rooflights in a period property, and whether faux plants are worth the money.
Worth readingThe biophilic design section, 24 posts and counting over a decade, covering natural light, biomorphic pattern, biophilic materials and moss wall art rather than treating “bring nature indoors” as a single trend piece.
Your DIY Family
A one-woman blog about Scandinavian-leaning decorating, styling and small DIY projects, with a steady run of home tours and organising guides. Useful if you are furnishing or restyling a home, especially a small flat, and want to see how the pared-back look works in a real UK space, and less useful if you are costing structural work.
Worth readingThe home tour series, which walks through real Scandinavian homes and small flats and names the actual pieces and finishes used, including a June 2026 tour of a contemporary-industrial kitchen fitted into a period room.
Period property
Older houses have their own rules. Both of these document what sympathetic, incremental work looks like over years.
The Place Between
Valerie founded The Place Between in 2020 as a social enterprise helping homeowners through renovation, coming to it from a background in law and from remodelling homes, planning extensions and conversions and managing full refurbishments. She writes first-person posts about her own coastal Victorian house alongside plain explanations of the parts of a project people get stuck on: what a builder’s estimate actually commits you to, how to prepare for a Building Control visit, contracts for trades, and when mediation beats a dispute. Useful if you are renovating an older or solid-wall home and would rather understand the process before you sign anything.
Worth readingThe June 2026 post on lime render, which works through her own repair at the back of the house and names the spec used, NHL 3.5 mixed with washed plastering sand and no additives, the colour matching, the curing timeline, and the decision to keep the original cast-iron vents. That level of specificity on breathable render is rare outside conservation trade sources.
Victoria’s Vintage
A long-running lifestyle blog that mixes local food and travel writing with an eight-year restoration of the author’s Victorian terrace, written up room by room with her own before-and-after photos. Useful if you own a period terrace and want to see what incremental restoration actually looks like over years, though it documents decisions and DIY methods rather than quoting costs.
Worth readingThe “Our Victorian Home” series takes the house one room at a time, and the cellar post is unusually practical for a lifestyle blog, tracing the damp flagged in the survey through to scraping back the old paint and brushing on two coats of Sika waterproof coating as a DIY job. The best entry point is “Before & After: How Our Victorian Terrace Looked 6 Years Ago”, which covers the frontage in detail: an ugly brick vent removed and patched with bricks made to match the originals, the front garden wall rebuilt in reclaimed Victorian brick with blue coping stones, Minton tiles cleaned, and bespoke iron railings and gate fitted.
Budget and frugal
Doing up a house slowly, second-hand and in stages, because that is how most of it actually gets done.
Dream of Home
Sarah is a freelance copywriter and content strategist who writes about doing up a home on a modest budget, from secondhand and upcycled furniture to practical guides on damp, heating and garden jobs. Useful if you are decorating or renovating without a designer budget and want the frugal option explained before the expensive one, though it mixes personal posts with broader how-to guides rather than being a single renovation diary.
Worth readingA run of plain-English heat pump posts in July 2026, including “Heat pump myths everyone should be wary of” and one on whether you have to replace your radiators, written for homeowners weighing the switch rather than for installers.
My Thrifty Life by Cassie Fairy
A long-running thrifty-living blog where the home and DIY section sits alongside budget food, money management and upcycling, written first-person by a full-time blogger who is also a columnist and features writer for Reclaim magazine, and who has been doing up her own fixer-upper for years. Useful if you are doing up a house slowly and cheaply and want the reclaimed-materials, end-of-line-bargain, do-it-in-stages approach rather than a full-budget renovation.
Worth readingThe house tour series, original Q&A interviews with real homeowners and designers about their own houses, including Interior Design Masters winner Roisin Quinn and finalist Jack Kinsey on his chapel renovation, in the designers’ own words rather than recycled press shots. Her own fixer-upper write-ups and a vintage caravan makeover run alongside it.
Garden and outdoor
Gardens, growing and garden buildings, which is where a lot of home-improvement money quietly goes.
Allotment & Gardens
A UK growing site started in 2004 that pairs a large reference library on vegetables, fruit, herbs, greenhouses and polytunnels with John’s ongoing allotment diary, which has followed him from two allotment plots to a Welsh smallholding. He has written nine books on growing and preserving food. Useful if you have taken on an allotment or are turning part of a garden over to food growing and want month-by-month practical guidance from someone actually doing it.
Worth readingThe allotment diary has run continuously since the mid-2000s and is still posted every few weeks, with recent entries covering the June and July 2026 heatwaves, the first potatoes, sweetcorn and beans. The month-by-month jobs-to-do guides are the practical companion to it.
Shedblog.co.uk
The official blog of the Shed of the Year competition, run by its founder and head judge, mixing profiles of real entrants’ sheds with practical build guides on insulation, corrugated metal roofing, partitioning and pub-shed conversions. Useful to anyone building, insulating or converting a garden building, or weighing an off-the-shelf shed against a garden room.
Worth readingShed of the Year itself, now in its 20th year. The site archives every winner from the 2007 Roman Temple onward, and the competition ran on Channel 4 as part of Amazing Spaces with George Clarke from 2014 to 2017.
The Middle-Sized Garden
A gardening blog written for people with ordinary suburban and town plots rather than country estates, by a former journalist who gardens a 100ft by 80ft walled town garden. Posts are reported pieces built on interviews with named designers, nurseries and garden owners, covering border planting, design decisions, wildlife-friendly choices and containers, so it suits a homeowner deciding what to actually do with a real garden of a manageable size.
Worth readingThe framing itself. Everything is scaled to a middle-sized garden and sourced from named experts, so the July 2026 piece on garden sculpture is built on an interview with Chris Stockwell at Kingham Lodge and names the individual artists. There is a companion YouTube channel that covers the same ground on video.
How this was compiled, and how to correct it
Every blog above was opened and read in July 2026. We checked who writes it, where they are, when they last published, and whether recent posts were their own work or bought placements. Where a site would not load, or where we could not establish an author’s name from the site itself, it was left out rather than described from guesswork, because getting a real person’s work wrong in public is worse than omitting them.
We have said plainly where a blog has a caveat: a project that is no longer in the UK, an author outside it, patchy posting, disclosed paid collaborations, or an archive that is better than the front page. Those are things you would want to know before you clicked.
This list will drift. Blogs stop, blogs restart, and a site that is editorial today can be sold for links next year. We will re-check it and update the dates, and we will remove anything that no longer belongs. If we have got a detail wrong about your blog, or you would rather not be listed, email [email protected] and we will fix it or take it down, no argument.
If a blog is missing, tell us. What is useful is the URL, who writes it, and one post you would send to a friend about to start work on their house. We will read it properly before deciding, and apply the same tests as above.