Planning a building project, start to finish

You know roughly what you want to do to the house. What you don't know is what happens first, who you're actually supposed to ring, and how long the whole thing takes before anybody turns up and starts building.

Here's the order it goes in, and more usefully, here's where things tend to go wrong. If you'd rather see the sort of work involved first, have a look at the projects we've designed.

Everybody does this the other way round and it's the single most common reason projects stall halfway.

What happens is that people decide what they want, get it designed, take the drawings to a builder, and find out it costs half again what they had in mind. Then they either shelve the whole thing, or they start cutting bits out of a design that was never drawn to be cut, and what eventually gets built is worse than what they'd have ended up with if they'd started from the number in the first place.

So tell us the budget at the first visit. We'd far rather design something you can actually build than something that looks lovely on a drawing and sits in a drawer.

And when you're working out that figure, remember the building work isn't the only cost in the project. There's the design work, the application fees, the Building Control charges, the structural calculations, possibly Party Wall matters, possibly a build over agreement if there's a public sewer crossing the site. None of them are enormous on their own but together they're a real number, and we'd rather you knew about them at the start than met them one at a time.

Before anything gets drawn, before you speak to a builder, and before you tell anybody what you've decided on.

We come out, look at the property properly, listen to what you want and more importantly why you want it, and tell you what's realistic. Whether it needs planning permission. What the constraints on your particular site actually are. What the timescales look like end to end. And whether the thing you've got in mind is genuinely the best answer to the problem you've actually got, which is a different question and often a more useful one.

That last point matters more than people expect. Quite often somebody comes to us wanting a two storey extension and goes away with a loft conversion and a single storey rear instead, because between them those two get more of what they actually wanted for less money and less upheaval. You can only really have that conversation with somebody who's stood in the house and seen how you use it.

That visit is free and there's no obligation at the end of it.

Everything is built on the survey, so this is not a corner to cut.

We measure the property properly. Room sizes, wall thicknesses, window and door positions and sizes, floor levels, ceiling heights, external elevations, ground levels outside the building, drainage runs and manhole positions and cover levels, and where the boundaries actually run as opposed to where somebody once put a fence.

We don't work from old drawings found in the loft and we don't work from estate agents' floor plans, because both are usually wrong and sometimes badly wrong. An error in the survey doesn't stay in the survey either. It carries through the design, through the planning application, through the Building Regulations drawings, and lands on your builder as a steel beam that's two hundred millimetres short with the ceiling already propped and three trades waiting.

We don't hand you one drawing and ask you to accept it, which is worth saying because plenty of people expect exactly that.

Usually we'll draw two or three options so you can actually see the difference between them, and where it's useful we'll take those options to builders we've worked with for years and get rough costs against each one. Which means that when you're choosing between a flat roof and a pitched roof, or between opening up the whole rear elevation and keeping a section of wall, you're choosing with real numbers in front of you rather than guessing and hoping.

Then you comment, we adjust, and we go round again until it's right. It usually takes two or three rounds and that's completely normal, it's how the good schemes happen.

Planning first if you need it, which is around eight weeks for a householder application from the point the council validates it rather than from the point you submit. There's a good deal more detail in how to get planning permission.

Then Building Regulations, which is a separate approval with separate drawings and takes around five weeks. Sometimes we'll run it alongside the planning application rather than after it, to claw back a few weeks where the design is settled enough.

If you're building anywhere near a boundary then Party Wall notices need serving, and those carry their own timescales of one or two months depending on exactly what you're doing. Start them early. They're the thing most likely to hold up a build that was otherwise ready to go.

And if there are conditions attached to the planning permission, some of them have to be formally discharged before you're allowed to start on site at all.

Now, at this point, and not before. Not while the design is still moving around.

Three quotes is about right, and they only mean anything at all if all three builders priced the same thing, which means they need a full drawing package and a written schedule of what's included and what isn't. Without that, one builder allows for scaffolding and skips and making good the garden and another one doesn't, and the cheapest quote is very often simply the one that left the most out. Then the extras start arriving once the project is underway and it isn't the cheapest quote any more.

We can put the work out for you to builders we know and go through what comes back with you properly. We look at what's excluded, what's provisional, what's a prime cost sum that could move later, and how the programme compares, because a builder who's four thousand cheaper but can't start for five months isn't necessarily the better option.

Whoever you use, check them yourself as well. Insurance, references, and go and look at something they've actually built.

Agree the programme and the payment stages in writing before anybody starts, and never pay a large sum up front.

And expect something unexpected, because it happens on a good proportion of projects. A drain nobody knew was there, foundations that have to go deeper than anybody predicted, something odd behind the plaster. It isn't a sign that anything has gone wrong or that somebody has made a mistake, it's a sign that you're digging into a building nobody has properly looked inside for sixty years.

We stay involved while the build is going on. Builders ring us, Building Control ring us, and when something turns up in the ground that nobody expected then it comes to us to sort out. That doesn't stop the day the drawings are approved, and we think that's a fairly important difference between somebody who sells you a set of drawings and somebody who sees the project through.

Ringing a builder first. Perfectly understandable, because a builder is the person who actually does the work, but a builder can't tell you whether you'll get planning permission and shouldn't be expected to. What tends to happen is that a rough figure gets quoted for a rough idea, the client anchors on that number, and then the real design turns out to cost something different.

Buying a plot or a property on the assumption that permission will follow. It sometimes does. It sometimes doesn't, and the price paid rarely reflects that risk. If you're buying anything on the strength of what you intend to build on it, get somebody to look at it before you exchange rather than after.

Designing for the house you'll sell rather than the house you live in. Estate agents will tell you what adds value and they're usually right, but you're the one living in it, and a fourth bedroom you don't need is worth less to you than a kitchen you actually enjoy standing in.

Leaving the Party Wall notices until the end. Two months, every time, and it's the single most common reason a build that was ready to start doesn't.

And starting work before the pre-commencement conditions are discharged, which quietly makes the whole development unlawful even with permission in hand.

From the first visit to a builder actually starting, allow a few months, and most of that is waiting for other people rather than for us. We start within days of being appointed and you'll see drawings within ten days of the survey, but planning is eight weeks and Building Regulations is five and neither of those is within our control.

The build itself depends entirely on what you're building.

The people who get frustrated are the ones who expected to be building in three weeks and nobody told them otherwise. The people who end up happy are the ones who knew the timescale from the start and got the approvals moving early, which is most of what this article is about.

For more information please call us on 07773 899 597 or contact us through this website.