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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.
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Sam_w
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...