Hi All,
I've got planning permission for a 5 bed house finally and now its time to get the detailed designs/building regs in. My architect is trying to push the whole thing under one package, whereas I'm going to get each piece of work packaged up and get people to tender. I'd hopefully want someone to do the groundwork/foundations etc, someone for the substructure, someone for the roof etc get it water tights and then do the internals or at least get one builder to do everything outside and i do all the internals myself with help.
What my architect is proposing is: -
Building regs and construction:
B-Regs pack and the construction pack is that some architects will split this. We’ve found it’s more time (and cost) efficient to do these as one package.
In simple terms the b-regs pack is the bare minimum required to get sign off. As an example this would state “external walls to be cavity walls and are to achieve 0.18U-Value” but wouldn’t tell you how to achieve this.
The construction pack would add the build-up for all of the elements of the build and look at the integration of the structural design within this too as large scale details. For example it would say “external walls to be brick faced with 120mm cavity partially filled with 90mm Kingspan CW27. Inner leaf of block faced in 12.5mm plasterboard. Allow for weep holes at 750 horizontal and 450mm vertical centres”. It would also provide items such as a full technical drawing for the staircase design for joiners to price from. It would include full electrical layouts, not just fire alarm positions etc for b-regs etc etc.
£6k + vat
£950+ vat for the structural engineer.
Obviously, I've used the architect to get past planning and think he's decent and honest. Is it prudent to shop around for this next stage or do they seem reasonable? He's a riba architect with all the badges etc. I like him it just seems a lot.