Can I please just rant about the process of finding a &!%£("&$* builder?

[mummabubs]

We hoped to get an extension to our kitchen back in 2021 (6m x 3m) so went through this whole process then, but costs were so high that we decided to wait and see if prices came down again after the pandemic. Four years later and prices have not come down at all, so here we are back where we started! We have the architect drawings already and have been on the road to get builder quotes for three weeks now, and already I'm absolutely sick of the process. We've made enquiries with six builders (four solo companies, two as part of property development companies... all recommended to us by friends/neighbours so I hoped it would be a smooth journey). All booked a day and time (not a time range) for coming out to quote us.

Builder 1 - I messaged an hour after he was due to be here. (By this point my three year old had already eaten the bribery snack that was meant to entertain her and lost interest in the distraction box aka the TV). Builder 1 eventually replied to say he'd completely forgotten but would come over immediately, he's "10 minutes away". Fifteen minutes later he messages to say he is leaving now, so I replied saying I didn't think he should come anymore as I have to leave the house in 25 minutes time to collect my son from school. Irony being he didn't see that message as he was driving. So he arrived, was there for about 5 minutes. Didn't ask a single Q, just took a photo of the site and then asked me to send him the architect drawings (which I had already done when he originally asked for them a week beforehand so he clearly hadn't looked a them). He then said he'll get a quote out to me in "about 3 weeks".

Builder 2 - Messaged me 30 minutes after he was due to get there saying he was running a little late (at least he messaged!) Was impressed with him when he was here and felt reassured. He said he'd get a quote out to us in "2-3 days". It's now been 2 weeks and he keeps saying a new date we'll get the quote on and then that date passes and he delays by another few days. My confidence is not holding out for this one.

Builder 3 - Finally a positive experience. Arrived on time, had clearly looked at the drawings, researched the area and even came with a suggestion to save us money on the exterior and give a more durable finish. I really liked him and his approach. He got a comprehensive quote to us within 48 hours (as he said he would). His quote total is £72,000. Which I'm genuinely not sure we can afford as we also need to fund the new kitchen, so I'm bloody crestfallen.

Builder 4 - Turned up broadly on time, asked Qs. At the end of the visit I asked roughly when we could expect to get the quote, at which point they said we would get the quote within two weeks of us paying the £300 (yes, £300) fee for a quotation. Nowhere on the website, or in the three email exchanges I had with the company before the visit did anyone mention a fee for quoting. They then tried to justify it by saying they go above and beyond and for that fee provide a 54 page document breaking down the build and costings. I don't want a bloody 54 page document, when do they envisage I'd have time to read it?! I just want a quote! At that point I had a bit of a sense of humour failure and asked (told) them to leave and said they'd completely wasted my time.

We have two more builders booked in over the next 2 weeks but I'm already dreading it. I've currently spent about 6 hours of my life either waiting for builders to show up, having the same conversation and then just waiting for anyone to actually send a quote, all while trying to entertain two young children who are bored. In my job I have appointments every day and if I was routinely late I'd receive an absolute bollocking. Also, if a builder doesn't want the job I'm not going to be mortally offended if they just say that. What drives me nuts is the dance of "yeah sorry will have a quote out to you asap ... in 2 days... by Sunday ... early next week at the latest". By this point I don't even want to consider them for the job but just want the quote amount so that I can benchmark it against any other quotes!

In my dreamland Builder 3 contacts me to say he's realised some fantastic cost savings we can make and can now do the build for 50k, but this seems somewhat unrealistic. And deep down I know that this is just the beginning of the stress that is renovation / extensions! Please someone tell me it gets better!!

It is a nightmare, we tried about half a dozen builders when we started revamping our house with very mixed results. Some real scammers out there as well.

Eventually we found a good one, not cheap but mostly reliable, it seems to be a tradition that builders never turn up quite on time but at least he was mainlyaround when he said he would be. We have stuck with him ever since and he has also now renovated some friends homes.

Is there any neighbour who you can ask for recommendations?

@TheNoonBell we got all of ours as recommendations from friends and neighbours so have tapped that well already 🤣

I don't mind if people are 10/15 minutes late, but it seems common that builders come an hour late often with no communication at all. It's really frustrating when I can't go out and run errands / do the food shop as I've spent the morning waiting in. I also know logically that as long as they can build well I shouldn't get too hung up on their time keeping. I guess when somone says 2-3 days for a quote and it becomes >2 weeks I start to question the accuracy of their assertion that the build would take 8-10 weeks 😅

Yeah, that's just builders, you have to be on them. They always seem to have too many jobs and prioritise whoever shouts loudest. I got very pushy with them as I was managing the project myself.

Good luck on your search!

I'm sure it is frustrating, but the flipside of it is that you're effectively asking five out of six busy people to work for free for the joy of you researching how much it costs to build your extension (and it sounds like you've already done this once already in 2021, and trust me, builders chat, so they will probably know about that). My DH runs a building company busy until end of the year at the very least and people never seem to understand how much work quotes are. He is known as excellent and luckily he has an sixth sense for identifying people who are going to mess around, asking endless questions and wasting tons of his time, and then go with the people they were going to go with all along. I don't mean to be rude, but a £50,000 extension isn't a big enough job to spend ages being 1/6 people quoting.

Normal.

We did an extension a while ago and agreed to pay for quotes because otherwise we just couldn't get people to quote.

Getting the work done is also hard to manage.

We said never again.

Appreciate the other side perspective. Sorry if I wasn't clear, we'd never ask someone to come here just to quote if we didn't think we might go ahead with them. I meant more that when people aren't reliable time or communication wise it then puts me off the idea of giving them the job (and obviously we don't know what anyone is like until we ask if they'd like to come and quote beyond recommendations). I'd never want to intentionally waste someone else's time which is why I feel so irked when people waste mine.

We've asked six builders this time as that was the advice we were given. Last time we got three quotes and there was £10-15k difference between each of them so felt really hard to know which were reasonable vs highly priced. We did then agree to go with one of them but they then appeared on BBC XRay the following week as their cowboy builder feature. He'd stolen tens of thousands of pounds and left many projects uncompleted. This put the fear of God into us as we'd genuinely thought they came across well and the next quote up (15k more) we couldn't afford.

This sounds excruciatingly frustrating! Hope you manage to get one soon

Can your architect recommend anyone? That’s how we found the builders for our extension.

It sounds as if you are getting so stressed by all of this and I don’t blame you! However I think you just have to accept that this can be tradespeople for you.

£72k sounds pretty reasonable for an extension that size so I suspect your expectations are out of whack

It’s a lot of money to spend - take your time in finding the right one.

We have had a solid good build done but dealing with the builder was awful at times due to how he was.

Sounds typical of trades tbh. Have you asked around friends/work colleagues to recommend a builder, especially those who have had a similar project built. Avoid any builders that can do it straight away and be wary of much cheaper quotes and also have a contingency fund for unexpected costs, projects rarely come in on budget. Good luck OP, it’s awful going through the upheaval but worth it once it’s done.

Problem with getting builders to quote aside it does sound like you've got slightly unrealistic expectations of how much these things cost. Materials costs have spiralled since Covid.

Can you revise your plans to make potential savings?

The skill set that makes someone a good builder is not the same skill set that that makes them a good administrator - unless they've got a separate person in their team who does the quotes at the admin side of things, this tends to happen and does not necessarily say bad things about the job they can do as a builder. Often the ones that are super efficient with quotes are the ones that will cost more because you're paying for the overheads that come with being a bigger company.

Unless you think that builder number 3 is straight up fleecing you I'd go with him. 72k for that size of extension doesn't sound bad at all. We are currently about two thirds of the way through a similar extension and our builders have been absolutely amazing. They weren't the cheapest but they have been incredibly efficient, proactive, and have kept to time and budget. It's not been easy living in a building site but they have made it bearable.

If you're finding it stressful just dealing with getting quotes think how much more stressful it will be to have a disorganised/ unprofessional builder doing your actual build. If you've found someone good whose price is reasonable I would 100% book him up quick.

Our ground floor refurb was completed last April (and still have snagging!) so this is fresh in my mind. We ended up going with builders who hadn't been recommended but they were only one of two who bothered to come back to us with a quote. What I learnt about this stage was the following: take 5* reviews with a pinch of salt but pay attention to any negative comments, even if only small niggles. Ask to see their work - not only pictures but videos and actual properties, if possible. Ours were happy to do this. If the head builder annoys you or fills you with rage from the beginning, this will be multiplied by a huge factor when the work begins as you will be dealing with them all the time, so make sure it is someone who you think you at least can respect, if not like. The cliche of picking your battles is also correct as, from my experience and from talking to lots of others, things such as timekeeping will be the least of your problems and one of the things to compromise on. For me the two big things were do I trust them and is their work of a high standard. We spent so much more than we planned (and I still have nightmares about what we owe) but I am currently sitting at my gorgeous island, looking at the sun stream (over my new patio) in on my lovely bright, smooth, modern and clean walls and floor and it still makes my heart soar and my life so much happier.

Thanks everyone! Personally I think £72k is likely going to be where it falls but DH has been doing research about average current costs and thinks we might get some quotes that are a little lower. Builder 3 doesn't have availability until Aug/Sept which would actually suit us well in terms of needing to remortgage first.

I think the comment about anyone who gives us the rage now being something that will magnify resonates as this is how I feel. We don't have the option to move out during the build so will be very much living amongst it all (another reason why sticking to timeframes as much as possible is important to me!) 😅

I'm telling myself it will all be worth it when we hopefully have it done by Christmas, but it's not exactly a relaxing process!

So all of the builders we contacted have been based on recommendations from neighbours/ friends of friends etc. We have two couples on our road who have had very similar extensions done recently - one who has had an absolutely horrific experience (so definitely wouldn't recommend her builder, which I guess is still helpful!) and the other are very happy with their extension but the company went into liquidation just after the build so not an option 🤦🏻‍♀️

We recently did a major renovation and found this was pretty typical of getting trades in. I think the time keeping seems off because I'm used to days of Teams meetings back to back and if you aren't punctual you never catch up. Whereas the builder is on a site somewhere dealing with whatever has come up (mid-project I think we ended up delaying someone's quote as the builder was having to deal with an unexpected problem for us!).

It took more than two months to get to final agreed quote with the builder we went with. The first quote took about five weeks to appear, then the revised one about another month. It was frustrating but understandable when I saw the detail of the quote - every single cost itemised. And I wondered how many got quotes and didn't go through with it, in your case 5/6 of the firms contacted aren't going to be successful. I know our neighbours got the same builder to quote but then realised there was no way they could afford it so only did a fraction of the work. Builders must spend a lot of time quoting for work that then doesn't happen.

Ours was worth it in the end!

We allowed for 15% contingency and ended up needing 9% of that which was on unexpected things that came up in the project. Ours was a £150k project.

No idea where your DH is doing his research but your experience has shown that if you want an apparently decent builder to do the job you want, it’s going to cost £72.

Let him waste his time hanging around for people who don’t show up if he’s so sure he’s right.

Apparently CheckaTrade website states average cost of an extension of that size in 2025 should be £56k (it has a tool that gives you a rough idea of how much you should expect to pay for a job). I'm not saying I agree with this at all, but hard for me to argue any differently when we only have one figure to compare with. I did start another thread about recent extension costs and it did seem to vary quite a lot depending on geographical location.

I would be very happy for DH to have to do some of the management, but he works full time (I'm part time so at home 2 weekdays) and every builder has requested weekday appointments so not a lot I can do there!

@mummabubs Fair enough but in my experience, online research for getting work done and real life experience are very different things. Good builders are like gold dust so if you find one that has been personally recommended, turned up on time and that seems to know what he’s doing, I’d get him booked in. If the price is too high for you, maybe you won’t get what you want, done well, for less so you’ll have to compromise.

If DH wants to hold out for another builder but you’ve exhausted your personal recommendations, I wouldn’t expect your extension this side of Christmas because if you find a good one, they’ll be booked months in advance (as you know from builder no.3).

6x3m extension for 72k sounds not outrageous to me but am in London so used to paying a premium.. does that include glazing and lots of power sockets...
Our 1st quotes some only specified about 6 ...we ended up with about 20!..
If you are remortgaging anyway it maybe worth including money for kitchen too... As you won't want to do it later...!
I sourced a lot of stuff...to save money, kitchen was from diy kitchens (fab) and builder fitted at sane time so saved time and finding another trade..

Def go with local recommendations and yes its painful.... But even though would tweak bits has transformed how we live

We had no choice which builder to go with as he was the only one who ever turned up, sent a quote and had availability. It started well but then his enthusiasm waned but, with a lot of badgering, he eventually completed the project and, largely, did a good job. Except he's never sent us the various certificates so I have no evidence of this other than the various photos I took at various points. We still owe him 10% but that hasn't been enough to make him send them through.
During the project (which lasted about 8 weeks in the end), his nan's boyfriend died, her first husband died and then his Nan herself died, his wife went into labour at 27 weeks, 29 weeks and then actually gave birth at 33 weeks, his toddler spent two nights in hospital, something terrible happened to his other child (can't remember what now) & he injured his back. What was ridiculous was that our nanny was really good friends with his sister-in-law and all of this was absolute bollocks. His wife also turned up on one of the last days he was here and, whilst pregnant, clearly hadn't had the baby.