Where do you live while your house is being renovated?

Moving out during a major renovation sounds simple until you actually try to find somewhere. You need a house, near your existing life, for a length of time nobody can yet confirm. Almost nothing in the rental market is built for that.

Holiday lets are designed around nights and weekends. They work well for a fortnight. Over months, availability changes underneath you, prices move with the season, and you end up renegotiating extensions instead of managing your build.

Serviced apartments are excellent for a week or two. By month four, with children, school bags, washing, work calls and half your belongings, a corridor with a kitchenette feels very different. There is nowhere to put anything, and nowhere to be apart from each other.

Ordinary rentals solve the space problem, but they are rarely designed around an uncertain building programme. You may genuinely not know whether you need four months, six or eight until the work is well underway, and an empty unfurnished house means furnishing a second home while rebuilding the first.

Living with family is generous, and often the cheapest answer on paper. It is not always sustainable for a whole season.

There is no honest average for a full renovation. A rear extension and a whole-house strip-out are not the same project, and anyone quoting you a single number is guessing. What we can tell you, having been through it ourselves, is where accommodation plans most often become painful: at the point where the programme moves and the place you are staying cannot move with it.

That is the gap Renovation Stay was made for — a real family home in Weybridge, furnished and running, available on a flexible monthly basis so you can stay close to school, work and the site while the work takes as long as it takes.

If you are weighing up the options, price them per useful month rather than per night, and then ask the harder question: in month five, when the build is behind and everyone is tired, where do you want to eat dinner?