How to make best use of the budget?

[MarkyP]

the one I'd add to the list is to learn to haggle and haggle over absolutely everything. It amazing how much some people will move on price, both for contracted works and suppliers of materials and fittings. This is one benefit of self managed builds where you are dealing with multiple sub-contractors and often sourcing materials yourself, if you are prepared to be really business like you can save a great deal. I have a column on my build cost sheet with quote price and discounted price for every single line of spend and the saving is now very large, paid for a hand made kitchen. You need to be fair and sensible with contractors, having an idea of the market trade rates for their services will help but I found most would usually give something back if they liked the look of the job. Suppliers are different, your goal is to find their very bottom price and it's amazing how much margin they have on many products. 

 

And watch out for what I called "Grand Designs Tax" - contractors who look at your project and think your fancy self build means you have a bottomless budget. My favourite was a largely competitive ground works quote which had a nice breakdown of works and line items, at the end of the list were lines for "setting out" £1000 and the rather ambiguous item "on and off site" £750. The quote otherwise already contained all the major elements of the work in detail, this was very obvious fluff.  A site meeting took place where I asked what on earth two blokes and digger might need to do to generate this £1750 of additional mystery cost for these works, contractor gives a cheeky grin, "oh right, yeah, that's a bit salty, must have been someone in the office, we can drop those" 

 

the setting out took a couple of hours, two blokes and a ball of twine, some stakes and a can of paint. On and off site I assume was a proposed levy for regular trips to and from a local cafe. Neither of which, I'm glad to say, I paid for!

 

[Hecateh]

3 hours ago, Crofter said:

You can also get good deals by being ruthless about pursuing low prices. There seems to be two different worlds out there- you get the people selling to the Grand Designs, Homebuilding and Renovating crowd, and then you get people selling on eBay/Amazon etc. I went online for my bathroom and the whole thing came in well under £1000. A posh high street design studio wanted to charge me double that just for the walk in shower enclosure alone.

My electric ufh for my en-suite being a good example.

 

Same company, same spec,  Their website cost was over £1500, their ebay shop, less than £900.

 

[Alexphd1]

There are a lot of middle men type companies in self build, don't be scared to miss them out completely.

 

I will use under floor heating as a example, you can pay a "specialist" to design and supply a bespoke system which sounds good but a lot of manufacturers (john guest, uponor etc) offer a free design (you won't get actual drawings until you buy but will get a spec ie 10x100m pipe). But there is another option of designing it yourself (use the manufacturers spec as a guide) some people use some simple cad programs. If you have a basic spec 10x100m pipe, 10 port manifold you can start to look at ebay for bargains. I recently stuck a link on here for 500m of uponor pipe that went for £84 at auction. At this kind of prices you could put together pump, mixer,  manifold and pipe for £600-£700 (or less) for 200m2 floor wet UFH.  A lot of self builders lay the pipe themselves and find a plumber to connect up.

 

 

 

Edited October 18, 2018 by Alexphd1

[ultramods]

I just bought a new (was used for a trade show) Bora BFIU on ebay today for £1900, RRP is £3100.

 

All I need now is a house and a kitchen to put it in