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Costing a build


Moonshine

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I am sure that this has been asked loads of times but here goes.

Planning is very likely to be granted for a house on our plot.

We are looking at the next steps in terms of whether to build ourselves or sell the plot.

I want to get a fairly accurate idea of cost of excavation, retaining walls, foundations, and the build itself so get an idea of how much finance we need to raise to build.

What are the best ways to do this, costing from builders, QS, online QS?

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Get a QS estimate, then reduce it by about 30%, then you'll be in the ballpark. You can also get some fairly solid quotes quite quickly by firing off your drawings to peopele, e.g. for Windows and doors, roof tiles, heating systems, foundation slab, intermediate floors and ground works/services etc. You can use those to fine tune your QS estimate. That's what we did. Got our QS estimate down from £390k to £250k (£1k/m², self managed project), and architect and bank were happy with it. Groundworks and services are the biggest risks and variables. Can be anything from £10k to £100k.

 

Where you are has a huge impact on cost. In SE England it seems you start at £1500/m² and go up... Here in northern Ireland it's almost half that due to much lower labour and quarry material costs. 

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16 hours ago, Conor said:

Get a QS estimate, then reduce it by about 30%, then you'll be in the ballpark

 

Our QS was within £1,000 of the cheapest sealed bid. One other bid was close, and two more were 10-15% higher. These were bids from prime contractors.

Edited by Temp
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On 27/10/2019 at 08:36, Conor said:

Get a QS estimate, then reduce it by about 30%, then you'll be in the ballpark

 

Would a QS be able to work off planning drawings or would they need to be BR / construction drawings, obs with planning drawings the margin for error would be bigger.

 

Any view on getting a local QS vs a online QS?

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10 hours ago, Temp said:

 

Our QS was within £1,000 of the cheapest sealed bid. One other bid was close, and two more were 10-15% higher. These were bids from prime contractors.

 

36 minutes ago, Moonshine said:

 

Would a QS be able to work off planning drawings or would they need to be BR / construction drawings, obs with planning drawings the margin for error would be bigger.

 

Any view on getting a local QS vs a online QS?

 

I think my QS estimate was so off as he only had the planning drawings... So no construction detail or spec to work on. Rubbish in, rubbish out. It gave us a starting point for the mortgage application, would never be accurate enough to budget a project.

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