Process
How we work: five stages, and you always know which one you are in
The most common complaint about builders is not price and it is not quality. It is not knowing what is happening, or when.
One · Site survey
Free, no obligation, and arranged for a time that suits you. We measure, we look at what the property will physically take, and we tell you what is realistic. If your idea will not work, this is where you find out — before you have paid an architect to draw it.
Bring whatever you have. Rough sketches, a board of saved photographs, a plan left behind by a previous owner: it all helps, and none of it needs to be tidy. What we are trying to establish is the gap between what you want and what the building will allow, because everything after this stage is shaped by it.
Two · Drawings and permissions
We work alongside your architect, or introduce one if you do not have somebody. This stage settles whether you are going down the permitted development route, making a full planning application, or combining both to get a better result than either allows on its own — which is what we have done on more than one house.
It also flags the things that catch people out: party wall notices and the statutory timescales attached to them, freeholder consent if you own a flat, conservation area restrictions, and building regulations approval, which is required whichever planning route you take.
These run in parallel rather than one after another. Handled in sequence they add waiting to the front of the job for no reason.
Three · Fixed quotation
Itemised, in writing, before anything is ordered or demolished. You will be able to see what each element of the work carries, which means you can make informed choices about specification rather than being handed a single number and asked to trust it.
The exclusions are listed as plainly as the inclusions. A quotation that is silent about what it does not cover is not a cheaper quotation, it is a less honest one, and the difference turns up later as a variation.
Four · Build
One team, one project manager and a weekly update telling you what happened and what is next. We are not running four sites at once and hoping.
Two commitments matter more than they sound. We tell you about problems on the day we find them, not at the end of the week when they are harder and dearer to fix. And where something we uncover changes what the work costs, you hear about it before we do the work, not afterwards.
On a Victorian house something will be found behind the plaster. That is normal, and no survey prevents it. What separates a good build from a bad one is entirely how it gets handled once it appears.
Five · Handover
Building control sign-off, all the certification, and a proper snagging process: you walk the job with us, the list gets written down, and we clear it. Then a warranty on the work.
Handover is a stage with a beginning and an end, not a builder gradually appearing less often until one day nobody comes back.
What we expect from you
Decisions, at roughly the time we ask for them. Most delays on a domestic build are not caused by builders or by councils; they are caused by a choice that had not been made when the programme needed it. Three hold jobs up more than anything else:
- Kitchen layout. It has to exist before first fix, because the sockets, the waste and the extraction all follow it.
- Tiles and sanitaryware. These carry lead times, and a bathroom cannot be finished around a missing item.
- Glazing. The longest lead time of the lot, and the one most often left until the opening is already formed.
We will tell you when each of them is due, well before it is urgent.
The first stage costs nothing
Everything above starts with an hour at your house. Book a free site survey and we will tell you what your property will take, which planning route applies and what we would be worried about — with no obligation to go any further.
