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Wondered when you'd pop up and show off about your bloody castle smiley face wink think to indicate I meant that in a jovial nature
But seriously, thanks for the input, I imagine thats the route I would go down. Almost want a meet with an architect to run them through my plans to see if they could improve, maybe a consultancy, incase there is anything I've missed/not maximised upon.
Was your guy able to get high end paints cheaper? I usually get Little Green or F&B and 20% off those across a whole house would be a few quid but I imagine those brands keep tight control of their prices and suppliers...
chrisbmx116-
Ha! sadly my bloody castle is currently surrounded by a inadvertent moat, but that is what happens when you have a house built on 10ft of non-draining clay, but it does keep the riff raff out.
Well our builder bought pretty much everything through one of the merchants (he played them all off each other), we did use a very niche specialist paint for the outside at £150 for 15 litres, and he was able to get 5% knocked off, which helped a few bit when you need as many litres as we did. One massive saving he was able to get us was on bathroom stuff, he got everything 15% cheaper than we could, but on kitchens the only ones he could get cheap was howdens and we wanted slightly better than that. So guess it will be case by case and will depends on what volumes he buys of the things you are looking for.
Actually that does remind me, we made sure that we went with a builder who had done lots of work of the type we were undertaking, he described our project as small and normal (!) and pretty much knew what to do whenever something that look catastrophic to us happened (like walls falling down, which happened on a daily basis to start with...) so def make sure you find someone who has done the type of work\ level of finish lots of times.
I would get some sort of design help, even if it isn't an architect, you will need someone to draw up plans for building control sign off probably anyway, and they may also be able to give you leads on good contractors. Also if you do need building control, there are two options you can either go local authority or a third party.
We ended up going with a third party (JHAI), I have very mixed feelings about this, I think building control should really be done by the local authority as the conflict of interest seems obvious to me. We went with the third party because we trusted our builder, and we needed a little bit of flexibility in places (head height over stairs) which he signed off without even measuring... But if I wanted to make sure that everything was done to the letter then I would go with LA.
Sam_w
to give you my experience, note I am not London based, so might make some difference...
I have just done a complete refurb on an 1800s house, and when I say complete refurb I mean it, literally took it back to four walls, no roof, well actually 3 walls...
We didn't use an architect, as like you we knew exactly what we wanted, so we used a building design agency to turn our hand drawn plans into plans that could be submitted for planning and also to turn our vague statements of "lots of insulation here" into an exact specification for both building control sign off and for contractors to quote against.
We employed a medium size building company, and tasked them to use their own sub contractors, although we agreed with us having power of veto over any of the trades we didn't like (we did this once with a plasterer we didn't rate). We didn't have a project manager, but I work in a log cabin the garden so spent a lot of time either answering questions or spotting someone just about to do something stupid and stopping them.
In terms of buying stuff, we did some buying direct and some got our builder to buy direct, for example he was able to get paint about 20% cheaper than we were able to, so we gave him a list and he bought it.
We didn't have any penalty clauses in place, and to be honest we took a much more laid back approach to it all, doing things like moving walls as the build went on, was quite nice to have a completely blank floor and put planks of wood on the floor to sort out the layout, we changed it a bit from what was on paper, for much the better.
One thing I didn't do and wish I did, was to include something that meant I could call them back at set time periods after the work has finished to do further tudy up work as things like plaster cracks appear, I am currently relying on the builder being sensible and sorting these, but would prefer something in writing.