How do I bathroom / kitchen / extension? etc.

ROFL

Exactly this. We love our house and can see ourselves living here for the rest of our lives, but it would be massively improved by the addition of a bedroom so that friends can come and stay and by enough space for us to work from home. The problem is that achieving that appears to be only just possible within our budget.

I'm not moaning about having to spend money to achieve that or the fact that it won't add equivalent value to the house. I'm frustrated by not seeming to be able to get to a place where we have an agreed spec at an agreed cost to be delivered under an agreed set of terms because we can't seem to get the people with the relevant expertise (i.e. the builder and the architect) to give us all the information that we need to make all the interdependent decisions that we need to make in order to actually get the project started.

Exactly. Not sure why people are getting all funny about this, builders and architects are not the easiest to understand or deal with at times, as multiple stories in many a thread attest.

You’re architect sounds pathetic and babyish and your builders not interested or able to flex. Plenty of other ways to get to your end goal, but will rely more on you.

Maybe you can do a @ectoplasmosis and smash it out the park.

We did this in our first house, TBH I think that is what sold it to the couple that bought when we moved.

Definitely feel you but thats just the reality of it. However big or small the project is these issues crop up and in my experience (im sure some have different ones) the more research and work you are willing to do will help minimise (not get rid of) the unknowns and problems that will happen. Especially dealing with architects (as someone has already said), they do fairly specific work and simply aren't QS'. Best case scenario is to have early contractor involvement so your builder can look at architects work early and say 'thats a dumb way to do it, do it like this' and then you have to take a view whether thats your builder being lazy/trying to take a shortcut or if theyre right from experience that the architect doesn't have. Then you have to cost it all up, then changing one thing will cause another issue etc etc etc. thats why a good Project Manager is worth having and will help you through lots of this and save you money. It doesn't mean that you can sit back and rely on it to just happen though! Just the nature of the beast

Im a Development manager by trade, ive built loads of houses blocks of flats etc but even my relatively small (big for me) £20k reno project in my house at the moment has come up against multiple unforeseen issues, some my fault, some the builders fault, others just examples of shit happening despite thinking at the beginning that id covered all bases.

It does also sound like you might want to talk to another architect

I do agree but sometimes you've gotta not just chuck money at something if you're gonna be in a hole just because you live in it. Well unless you've got deep pockets and a few hundred grand is nothing!

Probably not all that many but imagine it’s similar to how many people are spending 300k on a renovation

Sorry - I didn’t mean to come across harshly!

And I had plenty of gripes about the process

Probably true.

I think a lot have large sums from property appreciation or inheritance, but not necessarily the ongoing income to support spend above a fixed budget over the near to medium term.

I am thinking of people I know living in a £2m plus house, but can't afford a kitchen extension, and are stuck with one you couldn't swing a cat in.

Exactly this. Taking out a massive mortgage when we moved house allowed us to hold onto some capital from the sale of our old place. Add in some savings etc. and we've got a sum that we can just about do what we want with (or could before inflation screwed us). But it's going to be a long time before we can top up the coffers beyond an emergency buffer.

#thoughtsandprayers

Exactly!

My estate agent once told me sagely "jack, you wouldn't believe how much money some people have".

The bloke who purchased my old house in Leytonstone had a 220k household income. This house was worth about 50k in 1996 so was a house for a working man. Not someone who used to live in Mayfair, as my buyer did. Some people just earn a lot of money, have access to the bank of mum and dad, or were left 100k by grandma.

Given the massive increase in property values in the last 30yrs there will be quite a lot of people with large inheritances.

...if they don't all get spent in £10k/month care homes.

Yeah... I mean you obviously need people to die first before offspring can get an inheritance.

Well of course that's the cliche about buyers in Leytonstone.... priced out of Mayfair

What's the cliché for buyers in Homerton?

I think the majority of people who intend to buy in Homerton end up buying in Leytonstone

Well of course that's the cliche about buyers in Leytonstone.... priced out of Mayfair

did lol

People who can’t afford Vicky park, no?

You won't get what you're looking for (accurate costs, fixed materials quantities etc) from anyone.

If you have the time and inclination, you can put the legwork in yourself to spec the materials, and get an architectural technician (as @dbr suggested) to knock up some drawings of the details. This is what we're doing for our loft and extension; so far, we've only spent just over a grand on drawings that I made to be amended to building control requirements, and the obligatory structural engineer calcs. No other architect/quantity surveyor/project managers employed or paid for. It's gruelling and all-consuming, but we definitely couldn't have afforded to do what we're doing any other way.

Any designers, architects, architectural technicians on here?

Is there a universal format for architectural drawings? Our architect is ok to release the partially complete drawings to us for someone else to finish off, but wants to know what format we want them in.

generally .dwg is fine for importing into all the major software.

Thanks, much appreciated.