“The single most important person in your life will be your builder but there is no foolproof way to sort the good ones from the rogues. I found mine through personal recommendation. Smart Conversion brought the project in early, with almost no snagging needed, and almost on budget.”
Ruth Bloomfield – Property Writer (Evening Standard 25th Oct 2018)
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Worth all the angst: a step-by-step guide to creating your own grand design — from first plans to finishing touches
Red tape, nasty survey surprises, spiralling costs… this London property writer overcame it all to create her own Grand Design.
Tonight I have a hot date — with my sofa, plenty of giant chocolate buttons, Kevin McCloud and Grand Designs, the TV show for people obsessed with self-builders even though they themselves will never undertake a project more ambitious than having a new kitchen fitted. But this 18th series has a special frisson for me.
And while I still take malicious pleasure in the sight of hapless owners living in campervans as their dreams fall apart on TV, before the great panning shots of their finished homes, I now know Grand Designs can’t prepare you for your own pain.
Drawing up plans, dealing with council planners and party wall agreements, and tendering for a builder was so time-consuming that it was a full year before a single sod of earth was dug on my project. But it gave me a chance to make new friends of my neighbours. Mine have been fantastic.
There is a lot of red tape and everything must be done in order. You need your designs before you go for planning permission and the latter takes at least a couple of months to come through. It is not worth hiring engineers and party wall people until you have consent, then they take weeks to do their stuff. And you can’t draw up a tender document and start looking for a builder until you know all the details. The prep costs a frightening sum — £18,000 in my case.
It is essential to have an architect you really like and trust. I chose Simon Astridge. I liked his work. I also thought his optimism would be a good foil for my deep pessimism, and would be a plus when dealing with planners, neighbours, and anyone else who stood in our way.
The single most important person in your life will be your builder but there is no foolproof way to sort the good ones from the rogues. I found mine through personal recommendation. Smart Conversion brought the project in early, with almost no snagging needed, and almost on budget.
Another good way of finding a builder is to view the annual shortlists for New London Architecture’s Don’t Move, Improve! awards. These list contractors for each project and you can be sure they are capable of doing good work on a relatively limited budget.
You will have an idea of how much the project will cost in your head. It will be wrong. Everything, from light switches to latches, costs a fortune, and you will start talking confidently about the need for such things as waterproof substrates and mechanical ventilators that you’d previously never heard of.
Even once you’ve got a tender document drawn up and your quotes from at least three builders have come in, you still don’t know how much your project is going to cost.
Any problems, oversights, or technical issues that emerge once work has begun will be your responsibility. I spent just over £3,000 on an engineering survey, to avoid nasty surprises once work had begun. But within a week on site my builders pointed out that if they removed a bedroom chimney breast as planned, the ceiling would fall down — unless they inserted a huge plank of steel at a cost of close to another £3,000.
Trades tend to talk about costs without VAT. You will get awfully good at mental arithmetic as you start to add 20 per cent to everything.
Those of us who still think in feet and inches will also have to start referring to everything in millimetres. Or just mil, if you want to fit in.
If you want to save a bit of money, “client supply” is one option. “CS” means things you buy for your builder to use, from bricks to door handles to paint. The theory is that you can shop around and haggle harder than your builder might. I went CS in a big way but it was a huge commitment of time. It can take hours to hunt down just the right matt black light switches, and it’s stressful to get everything to the site at the right time. Even off-the-peg items such as bathroom taps can take weeks to arrive. If I had my time again I’d be ordering everything much earlier.
You’ll need to get to know the many warehouses in the North Circular hinterland, where you can venture on to industrial estates and buy materials direct. The Stone & Ceramic Warehouse is good for floor and wall tiles and advice, and Klynstone has a huge choice of worktops, kitchens and bathrooms. Further afield I found the perfect granite setts for my back garden at good prices and with free delivery from Lantoom Quarry in Cornwall.
For good value on kitchen appliances, it is hard to beat Appliances Direct, although the cooker hood I ordered was out of stock on delivery day and I had to buy a more expensive one. Small companies can also be excellent. In Ireland, Mullan Lighting had the best range of bathroom lights — the ones I bought weren’t cheap, but they’re among my favourite things in the house. I found two Victorian doors for £30 on eBay, while Etsy was great for lighting, hooks and hardware.
Everyone tells you to haggle but I just got embarrassed. In a few cases I opened a trade account to get 20 per cent off and some suppliers offered a “standard” discount without me asking. This probably saved me about two per cent.
I thought I could pre-plan the house but in reality Simon drew up what I now understand was more of a masterplan. The detail was mostly decided on site as work progressed — a scary business and where my architect really came into his own.
The black-painted staircase to hide the dishevelled state of the treads once the disgusting carpet had been ripped up; the open kitchen shelves to fit around a new flight of steps leading down into the room, and the limestone hearths to fill gaps left after the removal of hideous old tiles, were all Simon’s on-the-spot successful ideas.
Your friends will lose interest in your drama after two weeks. You will nonetheless share your angst over the right shade of blue-grey for the bedroom, and whether you can afford the luxury of a wine fridge. The build will be your world until completion.
So, did I need the wine fridge? The answer is a big fat yes.
Ruth Bloomfield – Evening Standard Homes & Property (25/10/2018).
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