Discover Online Games That Let Players Renovate Old Houses

The second house I renovated had a soft patch of floor in the back bedroom that I decided to ignore for three months. When I finally lifted the boards, the joists underneath were wet through from a slow leak in the bathroom above. Fixing it cost more than the new kitchen. A friend's teenage son, who had spent the winter playing House Flipper, looked at the photos and said, "You always check the floor first. Everyone knows that." He was right, and I was a little annoyed about it.

Renovation games have become hugely popular, and some are better teachers than I expected. Others teach habits that would ruin a real budget. Having renovated three houses with my own money, I want to sort the useful lessons from the misleading ones.

The games worth knowing

House Flipper and House Flipper 2

The best known of the genre. You buy run-down houses, clean, repair, paint, tile and furnish them, then sell for a profit. The sequel adds more detailed building tools and a story mode. Both are calm, satisfying and surprisingly specific about the order of jobs.

PowerWash Simulator

Purely about cleaning, which sounds dull and is oddly absorbing. It is also the most honest game on this list about how long dirty jobs really take. Cleaning one patio in the game can take 40 minutes, which is close to reality.

Builder Simulator and similar construction games

These go deeper into structure: foundations, walls, roofs and wiring in the right order. They are slower and less forgiving, and they teach sequence better than any other type.

Lessons that hold up in a real house

Strip and inspect before you plan

House Flipper makes you clear rubbish and clean before you can see what needs fixing. That order is correct. In real renovations, the biggest budget surprises come from things hidden behind wallpaper, under carpets and inside walls. On my first house I priced the job before stripping anything. My estimate was 40 percent short.

Work from the top down and the inside out

Games enforce a logical sequence: ceilings before walls, walls before floors, structure before finishes. Painting a ceiling after laying a new floor means drips on the new floor. Plastering after fitting a kitchen means dust in every cupboard. This seems obvious once stated, and yet real renovators break it constantly because they want to see progress.

Small fixes add up

The games list dozens of small jobs per house: replace a socket cover, fix a door handle, re-grout a shower. Buyers notice these things in a real viewing even when they do not notice a new boiler. On my most profitable house, I spent about 900 on small fixes and a deep clean, and the agent said it probably added more to the sale price than the new bathroom did.

Lessons that will cost you money

Every job is equally easy

In House Flipper, tiling a wall and replacing a radiator take a similar amount of effort and skill. In reality, the gap is enormous. Painting is easy for most people. Tiling is learnable. Moving a radiator involves draining a heating system, and electrical or gas work in many countries legally requires a qualified professional. Games give no sense of which jobs to leave to a trade.

Materials are cheap and always available

Game materials are instant and inexpensive. During my third renovation, the floor tiles I chose had a six-week lead time, and a kitchen worktop arrived cracked and took another month to replace. Real renovations are often delayed by materials, not by labour.

No permits, no inspections

Taking down a wall in a game is a click. In a real house, removing a load-bearing wall needs a structural engineer, a steel beam and, in most places, approval from building control. Doing it without approval can make a house difficult to sell later, because buyers' solicitors will ask for the paperwork.

Value goes up with every improvement

In most flipping games, each improvement adds a predictable amount to the sale price. Real buyers do not pay pound for pound for your spending. A 20,000 kitchen may add 8,000 to a house's value, or nothing at all if the street's prices are capped. That subject deserves its own piece, and we have one: How not to over capitalize on your home renovation.

A quick comparison

Using a renovation game before a real project

I would not tell anyone to learn renovation from a game. I would tell them to use one to rehearse. Before my third house, I spent an evening recreating its layout roughly in House Flipper 2 and working through the job list in the game's order. It took about three hours. The exercise produced a written sequence of 46 jobs, from skip hire to final clean, that became my real plan. I still underestimated time, but I did not forget any stage.

The first ten lines of that list, for anyone curious, were: book the skip, strip carpets and wallpaper, check floors for soft spots, check under the bath and sink for leaks, test every socket, get the boiler serviced, have the roof looked at from a ladder, photograph every wall before plastering, order long lead-time materials, and only then book trades. The game had taught me most of that order. The real house added the boiler, the roof and the lead times, which no game I have played ever mentions.

That gap is the clearest summary I can give. Games teach the sequence of visible work very well. They leave out the hidden systems, the paperwork and the waiting, which is where real budgets go wrong.

If you are tempted to buy a project house after enjoying these games, spend a few hours with a builder or a surveyor at a real property before you bid. Ask what they would check first. The answer will almost always be the roof, the damp and the floors, which is exactly what my friend's son told me, two years too late. More practical renovation pieces are in our Renovation section, and other property-themed games are under Games.