Insurance, accreditation, quotes, payments, contracts and the warning signs. What to check before you let anybody start work on your home, written by a firm that expects to be checked.
Most building work goes wrong long before the first brick is laid. It goes wrong at the point somebody decides who to trust.
Hiring a builder is one of the biggest financial decisions most people make, and it is usually made on less information than buying a second hand car. There is no register you have to join to call yourself a builder in this country, no exam and no licence. That is not a scare story, it is simply how the trade works, and it puts the job of checking firmly with you.
The checks are not complicated. Insurance, accreditation, company records, a proper written quote, a sensible payment structure and a contract. An evening of reading and a few emails will separate the firms running a real business from the ones that are not, and none of it will offend anybody worth hiring.
We are a design and build company in Reigate and we have been building since 1996, so we plainly have an interest in you choosing carefully. We have also been called in more than once to finish work somebody else walked away from, and the pattern is nearly always the same. The warning signs were there at the start, and they were quiet ones.
Six things worth having in writing. Any established firm will have every one of them to hand and will not blink when you ask.
Everything here can be confirmed by email in a day or two, and most of it is free to look up yourself. Do it before you agree a price, because once a deposit has been paid you have lost most of your leverage.
Send the requests in one short message. A firm that answers promptly and in full has told you a lot about how the job will run. A firm that keeps meaning to send it over has told you rather more.
Three quotes for the same extension can come back thousands apart, and the natural assumption is that the lowest firm is the good value one. Far more often it is the firm that has left things out. Not dishonestly in every case. A builder who spends twenty minutes at the house and prices from memory may genuinely believe the figure. It is simply that nobody has yet costed the steel, the drain run, the scaffold, the skips or the making good.
The only way to compare is like for like. Give every firm the same drawings, the same written specification and the same list of what you expect them to supply. Then read the quotes side by side and mark where they differ, rather than skipping to the total at the bottom. Where one is far lower, find out why before you treat it as a saving. It is nearly always a lower specification, work hidden inside a provisional sum, VAT excluded, or whole trades left off for you to arrange yourself.
Ask each firm what they have assumed and what they have deliberately excluded. A builder who says the ground is unknown and has put a provisional sum against the foundations is being straight with you. One who has priced a fixed foundation figure without digging a trial hole is guessing, and the guess will eventually land on your bill. Watch the timing too. A quote for a loft conversion that arrives an hour after the visit has not been priced, it has been estimated in the van.
A quote is a document you may need to lean on months later. It should read like one.
There is no legal template, so quotes vary enormously in quality. The test is simple. If you handed it to somebody who had never seen your house, could they tell what is being built, what it costs, who supplies what and when the money changes hands? If not, ask for it to be written again properly. That request alone will thin the field.
Money should follow the work, not lead it. Here is a structure that protects both sides.
The commonest way homeowners lose money on building work is paying a big deposit for a job that never properly starts. If a builder wants a third of the contract value before anybody arrives, ask what that money is actually for. There are honest reasons for a modest payment at the outset, usually where materials with long lead times have to be ordered and paid for, such as windows, structural steel or a kitchen. Even then it should be tied to a named order you can see a copy of, not a round percentage of the whole job.
For everything else, pay in stages against work that is finished and that you have walked round and looked at. Pay by bank transfer so there is a record, keep every invoice, and never hand over cash for a discount. The discount is small and what you give up in return is everything.
A modest payment only where long lead items genuinely have to be bought in advance, tied to a specific order with a copy attached rather than a percentage plucked out of the air.
Foundations complete, structure up and watertight, first fix done, second fix done. Each stage looked at by you before it is paid, and invoiced against what is finished, not what is promised.
At any point, the money you have handed over should sit slightly behind the value of what has been built. If it drifts in front, stop and ask why before you pay anything else.
A small percentage, agreed in advance, held back for a set period after handover and released once the snagging list is cleared. No reasonable builder objects to it.
A contract is not an insult to a builder. It is the thing that stops a disagreement becoming an argument.
Plenty of domestic building work in this country still runs on a handshake and a text message. It works out most of the time, and when it does not, the homeowner is the one with nothing to point at. A written contract costs nothing and takes an afternoon. Standard forms exist for domestic projects and are widely used for extensions, loft conversions and full refurbishments, and your solicitor can look one over if the job is a large one.
It does not need to be long or full of legal language. It needs to say who is doing what, for how much, by when, and what happens if any of that changes. Variations deserve particular attention, because almost every project has some. Agree that any change to the scope is priced and confirmed in writing before it is carried out, and you remove the single biggest source of arguments about the final bill.
Photographs are edited. A live site and an old client are not.
The state of a builder's current site is the best single predictor of what your house will be like to live next to for three months. Ask to visit one, and go.
Anybody can show you work that finished last week. The interesting question is how a job looks after two winters, and whether the builder came back when they said they would.
Trust your instinct, but check it against this. Most of the bad stories start with one of the items on the left.
Print this, or keep it on your phone. The answers, and how readily they come, will tell you nearly everything.
Most of the trade is made up of skilled craftsmen who take real pride in the work and would be embarrassed to leave a job in a poor state. The checks in this guide simply move the decision off gut feeling and onto evidence, and they cost you an evening. The firms you want to hire will not mind them in the slightest, because they answer the same questions on every commercial job they price.
If you are gathering quotes for work in Surrey and you would like ours among them, we are based in Reigate and we cover the towns and villages around it. We have been building since 1996, we are CHAS accredited and SSIP assessed, we are fully insured, and we will hand over any document on this page without being asked twice. Tell us what you are planning on our contact page, or ring 07973 933125, and we will come and look at the house properly before we put a figure to anything.
from the soil in the ground to the keys in your hand
