Owning your own home

I (and probably Fox) would say "don't use Kensington Green"!
Don't go by online ratings. Often there will be a discount for a good review.

Let your neighbours know in advance. Get necessary permissions well in advance. Be nice and listen to all complaints. Deal with those you can, and prepare for chancers. We had one neighbour claim that our builders had got paint on his car which was 100 yards away. Which would have been feasible if they had actually done any painting at that stage.

I would also say don't hire a building firm and let them manage it all. They will give you generalists and it will take much longer because the guy who could have been plastering your bathroom is currently outside repointing the brickwork and that's going to take 3 weeks. That and the decent carpenter who was on the job at the start will be off to another job the next week and will be replaced by a muppet.

Project manage it yourself or pay one, and hire different specialists yourself. Some jobs require general builders, but some, such as plumbing, heating, plastering, electrics, tiling etc, need specialists and you can potentially have all those jobs going on at once instead of queueing up.

Institute penalty payments for overrunning the completion date. I'd have had our builder paying us instead of us paying them if we had, such was the extra time it took. And if we had we might have not had many days where there was only 1 or 2 people on site.

Get your designs, specs, scope of work and finishes planned in advance. Don't let your builder make those decisions for you. Where finish matters (e.g. top-coat paint, tiles, bathroom fittings, taps, flooring) source your materials yourself. Let your builder source the rest. If something is expensive and in limited supply (e.g. those lovely bathroom tiles you chose) then let them know so they take more care.

If something isn't good enough, complain and ask for it to be redone until you are satisfied. We got some excellent work done by Kensington Green but we also had some shit work I am still not happy with and will have to redo. Worse still they took the piss in a couple of ways: for example painting over rotten window frames I asked them to repair, and even painting over glass instead of reputtying 1st and 2nd floor window panes. They probably didn't expect me to climb the scaffolding and take photos of all their work!

And on that note, do climb the scaffolding and take photos of all the work.

Make sure that someone who is on your job every day speaks good English. This is so important! I lost count of all the delays and expense we had because there was some simple problem that could have been sorted quickly and cheaply if only someone had been able to tell us about it, or had the nous/language ability to go to fucking Plumb Centre and buy a £10 shower waste instead of not knowing what to do until the boss came round 4 days later.