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How not to find a builder
First-time self-builder Sarah Ball describes her troubles finding a builder for their highly contemporary project in Derby
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t’s the one phone call my husband Andy and I didn’t want. Three years and one month of living in a property we were ready to flatten and the builder says he’s sorry, but two jobs have just come
in ahead of ours so he won’t be able to start ours for at least 38 weeks. Your heart sinks. We were just about to sign contracts. We had made a load of
savings to get the price right. They were coming back to us with the final prices and we were ready to go. We were also investigating whether to switch to a complete timber frame build to save time – currently it’s a hybrid with a traditional build on the ground floor and timber frame on the first. It’s not the first time we’ve been scuppered. In March last year
we were let down by the builder who we were waiting for. His previous jobs were taking longer so we hung on, and hung on – until we were told that his company was in trouble so it was a non-starter. We have spoken to other builders in between times. We have
sent the plans over and had meetings. More than half haven’t even come back to us with prices and others just push something through the door that’s so far over our budget that we simply discount it. We’re on a budget for two reasons. One – the plot has a ceiling
price and we don’t want to be spending more than it’s worth. The other – we have agreed a top limit for the mortgage we’re prepared to go to. But it’s not unrealistic. We had all the costing done by a quantity surveyor and we were there or thereabouts. The problem is that you invest so much time in builders. This time
we spent more than six months and with the first builder, almost nine. We have lived onsite since December 2013 – that’s four
Christmases. It’s awful. When we first moved in we cleaned, ripped up carpets, slapped a bit of white paint around and plumbed in a kitchen sink, dishwasher and washing machine. We bought an extremely cheap electric oven that was previously dropped. Our aim from the start was to create a home we could live in for-
ever. A future-proofed, energy efficient home. We didn’t mind whether it was a refurb or new build. We spoke to four architects
and chose the one we felt we could work with best. We asked them to create two designs, one for each scheme, and we would then take forward the one we liked best. Of course, in hindsight, we probably knew we would be seduced
by the new build. Building from scratch is on both of our bucket lists. This is pretty much the perfect plot for it – 13 metres by 30 metres – in suburbia, backing onto the park and within a five-minute walk of both Co-op and Tesco, a newsagent, cafe and chip shop. It’s also a 10 minute walk from our office. It currently has a flat roofed house on it – and we thought, quite rightly, that planning permission for a crisp white box would be easier here than most places. So here we are with full planning permission, a mortgage offer
that’s running out, and no builder. Up to now we’ve been looking at letting the project as a single contract – and it looks increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to do this. We have had so many conver- sations about what our next step could be and now we think that these are our best options: One, revisit refurbishing the property. The scheme could be sig- nificantly cheaper and easier to manage and we have a meeting with a builder booked in for this – so fingers crossed. We dug out the plans and could see ways of making it work. These would need to be properly worked up as construction drawings so there’s extra cost and we would need to apply for planning permission which could set us back another four months. Two, find a project manager – our architect is coming back to us
with someone who may be able to manage the project on our behalf. We have been down this path before and not found anyone; I think if we lived closer to London this would be easier. Option three, we project manage it ourselves, working with the
timber frame company. We let the individual stages of the build and take the hit on the stress! We have both managed refurbishment proj- ects before and Andy’s background is in commercial roofing so he’s well placed to do this. Whether its option one, two or three, we need to make the deci- sion soon because we can’t continue to live in the house as it is.
selfbuilder & homemaker
www.sbhonline.co.uk
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