The call comes in about twice a month and it always sounds the same. Someone has bought a place, or is about to, and they need the work finished by a date. Christmas. The summer. A tenant moving in. “We’re looking at about four months — is that doable?”
Four months is not the problem. Four months is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to renovate an apartment. The problem is that the four months starts from the phone call, and the phone call is where the queue starts, not where the build does.
Here is the uncomfortable version. Every builder in this city worth putting on your property is already busy. Their diary was filled by people who rang three, four, six months ago. If you ring today and someone tells you they can start in a fortnight, you have not found a bargain. You have found the builder nobody else is using, and there is a reason for that.
The availability paradox
This is the bit that catches foreign buyers hardest, because it runs against instinct. You are the customer. You have the money. You expect to be able to spend it.
But a small building firm’s most valuable asset is not its equipment or its office. It’s a full diary. A good outfit here is running two or three sites at once with a crew they want to keep employed and paid, and they plan that work out months ahead so there’s no dead week between jobs. When you ring, you’re not asking them to do you a favour. You’re asking to be slotted into a sequence that already exists.
The firms with immediate availability are the ones whose sequence has holes in it. Sometimes that’s innocent — a job fell through, a client went quiet. Often it isn’t. It’s a crew that just got walked off a site, or a company that keeps losing tenders because their prices don’t hold, or an operator who takes deposits and starts jobs faster than he finishes them.
You can’t tell which from a phone call. So the safest read is the boring one: treat instant availability as a question to be answered, not a stroke of luck. Ask what they finished last month and where. Ask to stand in it. And check the licence — who you’re really hiring is a ten-minute check that most people skip.
What four months actually buys you
Here’s roughly how the front end of a job runs when it’s done properly. These are ranges, not promises — a small bathroom is not a full house, and Porto is not the Douro.
Scoping the work: two to four weeks. Somebody has to walk the building, measure it, and write down what’s actually being done, in what order, with which materials. Not “renovate kitchen and two bathrooms”. A real scope, itemised, that four different builders can price against the same lines. Skip this and you don’t get a quote, you get a guess with a number on it.
Design, if you need it: one to three months. Moving walls, changing layouts, anything structural or anything the câmara needs to see — that’s drawings, and drawings take as long as they take.
Out to tender and back: three to four weeks. A builder pricing a job properly has to visit, measure, ring his own suppliers and sub-trades, and get numbers back. That takes a fortnight minimum. Chase him for it in three days and you’ll get a fast number that gets corrected upwards later, on site, when you have no leverage left.
Levelling and choosing: one to two weeks. Comparing the quotes line by line, finding what one has included and another has quietly left out, asking the questions that close the gaps. This is where most of the money is saved and almost nobody spends time here. It’s also why three quotes are never comparable unless somebody wrote the scope first.
Contract, deposit, mobilisation: a week or so. Signature, scope attached as an annex, payment schedule tied to stages, deposit against a proper invoice.
And then the queue. Two to four months is normal for a builder you’d actually want. Sometimes more if you want a specific team.
Add those up honestly and you get three to six months before a single tool comes out of the van. That’s the number. That’s why we tell people to allow it.
Licensing sits on top of that, and it’s the one I can’t give you a figure for. It depends entirely on the route your job takes — some works are exempt, some need a comunicação prévia, some need a full licence — and it depends on which câmara you’re dealing with and whether the building sits in a heritage or ARU zone. Porto’s historic core adds a layer. That’s a conversation with the câmara about your specific address, and it should happen early, not once you’re committed. Anyone who quotes you a licensing timeline without having looked at your address is guessing. The 2024 Simplex changes sped some of it up and moved risk onto you at the same time.
Then there’s the build itself
Only after all of the above does the actual work start, and that has its own clock.
A cosmetic refresh of an apartment — decorating, floors, a bathroom — runs six to ten weeks. A full apartment renovation with rewiring, plumbing, new bathrooms and a kitchen is more like four to six months. A house, or anything structural, or anything with a roof in it: six to twelve months, and be relaxed about the top of that range.
Two things stretch it that people never budget for. August, when Portugal largely stops and half your trades are away. And lead times on the things you order rather than build — windows, bespoke joinery, some tiles and stone. Windows in particular can sit at eight to twelve weeks from order, and if you order them late they hold up the plastering, which holds up the floors, which holds up everything after that. One late decision on a window colour can cost you a month at the back end.
So a buyer who rings in September wanting to be in by Christmas is roughly a year out. Not a bit optimistic. A year.
What happens when you compress it anyway
People do try. Sometimes there’s a real deadline and no choice. The outcome is predictable enough that I can describe it before it happens.
You take the builder who’s available. You skip the proper scope because there’s no time, so you’re pricing off a page of bullet points. The quote comes in low, because an empty scope always quotes low — there’s nothing in it to price. You pay a deposit to get moving.
Then the job starts and reality arrives. Every item that wasn’t in the scope becomes a variation, and variations get priced on site by the person doing the work, with you standing there needing it finished. That’s not a negotiation. Costs run twenty, thirty percent over. The date slips regardless, because rushing a build doesn’t make trades appear — it just means the plasterer follows the electrician before the electrician’s finished, and someone comes back to open the wall again.
You end up late anyway. Only now you’re late and over budget, and the work’s been done in a hurry by people who weren’t chosen carefully.
That’s what being a mark looks like in this trade. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s just a series of small compromises made because of a date, each one reasonable on its own, adding up to a job you’d have run completely differently with three more months at the front.
What to do if you’re reading this with a deadline
Ring before you buy, not after. The best time to start the clock is while you’re still deciding on the property, because everything above can run in parallel with the purchase — the survey, the scope, the tender, even getting into a queue. Buyers who talk to us at CPCV stage routinely start work within weeks of getting the keys. Buyers who ring us after the escritura are starting from zero.
If you’re already past that, be honest about which of the three you’re prepared to give up: the date, the budget, or the quality of the person doing the work. You will give up one of them. Choosing which beats having it chosen for you in month three.
And if the answer is that the date genuinely can’t move, then the work has to shrink to fit it. Do the envelope now — roof, water, structure, electrics — and leave the kitchen for next year. That’s a real plan. Trying to do everything in a window that won’t hold it isn’t.
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