Don't get your fingers burned
March 16, 2012
By Hugo Tugman; co-founder of Architect Your Home, architectural designer, author, public speaker, expert panelist and features writer for a range of national titles.
First of all and, in our experience, prices offered by builders for undertaking home renovation works, can be wildly variable, particularly in the past three years.
No tender loving care
Looking at in excess of thirty projects sent to tender in the past three years in just about every case, the difference between the highest and lowest price tendered has been over 100%.
It seems ludicrous, but whether it's been a major refurbishment of a large house (where prices varied from a high of £480,000 to a low of £225,000) or a joinery package for a flat (where the high was £38,000 and the low £15,000) we've found huge variations. Even more extraordinarily, it's not even been that certain contractors are always expensive or cheap. We often tender the same contractors and one might be very high on one project and very low on another. Just recently the simple task of fitting a bathroom in my Father's house down in Rye was priced by one company at £11,000 and by another at £4,500.
Frankincense, Gold and Grrrr...
It's really important to seek guide prices from at least three contractors. Shopping around should give you a better range of prices. Some customers come to us knowing at the start of their project who they are using as their contractor, typically though the majority want support and guidance with sourcing the right builder for their project, which we can help with our **Contractor Database** available to anyone who uses the Architect Your Home services.
It's also important to recognize that eventual cost of such projects is much more under the control of the homeowner themselves than most people realise. With most things in this industry, you get what you pay for and the customer will need to make a series of value judgments in the preparation process in order to stay within a certain budget. There is always a more expensive option and these are almost always better in quality - **it is the Architect's duty to illustrate the options and often this might put the overall price over the budget**. In the end, only the customer can make these value judgments - and these judgments will make a huge difference to the total eventual cost.
A good friend of mine was hoping to do work to a house that he was contemplating buying. We went through what he was hoping to do and he asked me how much I thought it would cost if he did it on a tight budget. I gave him all of the usual caveats about how variable things are, but totted a few figures up and we came up with a figure of about £160,000. "Great" he said, "so that means that if I spent £180,000 I'd get a really great job?" I was sorry to have to tell him that to get the "really great job" he envisaged would probably require nearer £400,000. The choice of everything inside, from tiles to taps and from heating to handles varies by a factor of at least 1,000%* - and it's down to the customer (with the help and advice of their architect if they wish) to have the discipline to choose the options that fit the budget rather than the options that are really lovely.
* For example you can find floor tiles for £27 per square metre, but equally you can find much nicer ones that are over £270 per square metre. You can buy a kitchen mixer tap from B&Q for about £40. You can equally buy a beautiful pewter finish, quarter turn ceramic disc kitchen tap for well over £400. Many people think "well, I'm spending all this money, what is a couple of hundred pounds in the scheme of things?" - However, budgets typically soar mainly as a result of a myriad of such choices, rather than a few big things.
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