Project Management & Main Contractor

The usual arrangement, and how you end up in the middle

Four appointments, four contracts with you, and no contract at all between the people who have to agree.

The standard route goes like this. You find someone to draw it. They recommend an engineer, or you find one. You take the drawings to two or three builders for prices. Then, to save money, you appoint some trades directly: the electrician a friend used, the kitchen company, the window supplier who quoted at a show. Everybody has a contract with you. Nobody has a contract with anybody else.

That works perfectly while everything goes to plan. Its flaw is that it contains no mechanism for disagreement. When the window company says the opening is wrong, the builder says the drawing was wrong and the technician says it was built wrong, all three are correct within their own frame, all three are owed money by you, and none of them owes anything to the others. You are now the arbitrator, and the evidence is technical.

The cost is rarely the argument itself. It is the four weeks the job stands still while it happens, and the trades who take other work in the meantime and are not available when it resolves. There is also a version that looks like our arrangement but is not: a builder who prices the build only and tells you to sort the drawings and the engineer out yourself. It sounds reasonable. It leaves the two decisions that constrain everything downstream outside the contract.

What we are not, and why we say it plainly

We are builders. Architecture and structural engineering are separate professions and we buy them in.

Architect is a title protected in law, and only someone on the statutory register may use it. A builder describing themselves as an architect is not exaggerating, they are committing an offence. So the distinction matters even before you get to competence.

Structural engineering is not protected in quite the same way, but the substance is identical. Calculations Building Control will accept come from someone with the qualifications, the software and, above all, professional indemnity insurance standing behind their signature. Public liability cover responds to injury and damage. It does not respond to a wrong number in a calculation. Indemnity is the policy that does, and it is why the calculation should come from someone who carries it.

So bringing in a technician and an engineer is not outsourcing the difficult parts. It is the correct arrangement, and every competent main contractor uses it. What we add is knowing which of them your job needs, at which point in the sequence, and precisely what to ask them for. Where this matters most is the builder who says you do not need an engineer for that. Occasionally true, for a very small opening with a standard lintel. Usually it means nobody wants to pay for the calculation, and Building Control will ask for it anyway.

Stage payments, and the deposit that goes wrong

Money follows completed work. That is the whole rule, and everything else is detail.

We work on stage payments against work actually done. A stage is a defined and visible point: foundations in and inspected, walls up to plate level, roof on and watertight, first fix complete. You can stand in the garden and see whether it has happened. A modest sum at the outset for materials ordered specifically for your job is normal. A large percentage of the contract value before anything is on site is not.

That single arrangement sits behind more bad outcomes than anything else in this trade, for a simple reason. Once the money is ahead of the work, the only leverage you have left is the money you have not yet paid, and there is not much of it. The test is easy to apply at any point in the job: add up what you have paid, look at what has been built, and if the first is meaningfully ahead of the second the structure is wrong regardless of who is doing the work.

Worth knowing as well: a contract you sign at your own kitchen table is an off premises contract, and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give you fourteen days to cancel it. If you want work to start inside that period you have to ask for it in writing, and where a trader never told you about the right at all, the cancellation period can extend by up to a year. A builder who handles that correctly is telling you something about how they handle everything else.

The programme, and what actually moves it

Some of it is ours to control. Some of it is fixed in law. Confusing the two is how impossible dates get promised.

What we control is the order of the trades, whether they turn up, whether materials were ordered early enough, whether the next stage is ready when the last one finishes, and whether a problem is dealt with in the week it appears rather than the month afterwards. That is the part a main contractor is actually being paid for.

What nobody controls starts with the statutory periods. A householder planning application has a determination period of eight weeks from validation. Larger home extension prior approval runs to forty two days. Party wall notice periods are one or two months depending on which section applies. Those are set in law and are shortened only by the adjoining owner consenting in writing, and not by us. Third party approvals have their own timescales, and a build over agreement may need a drain survey before it can even be applied for.

Then there is weather, which stops groundworks in a wet February and stops roofing in a gale, and lead times, because structural steel, rooflights and large glazed units are made to order. What we do about the parts we do not control is start them early and run them in parallel: party wall notices out while the planning route runs, steel ordered off the approved calculation rather than after the dig. We would rather give you a date that has allowed for the weather than one that assumes there will not be any.

Snagging, handover and what you keep

The last two per cent takes longer than it looks, and it decides how the whole job is remembered.

Near the end we walk the work with you and write a list. Not a list we produce and hand over, a list you produce with us, in daylight, with time to look properly. Doors and catches, seals, paint edges, tile lines, a socket in the wrong place, anything at all that is not right.

Snagging is normal and a snagging list is not evidence of a job gone badly. Every building project has one. The meaningful difference is between a builder who invites the list and one who resents it, and between a list that gets booked in as a piece of work and one that gets chipped away at over four months. We book it.

At handover you get the paperwork, and you should keep all of it with your deeds. The completion certificate from Colchester City Council Building Control. The certification for the notifiable electrical work. The structural calculations and the approved drawings. The party wall award if there is one. Appliance and heating documentation where it applies. When you come to sell, a buyer’s solicitor asks for precisely these documents, and reconstructing them years afterwards is difficult and sometimes impossible. We also photograph what gets covered up as we go, so you have a record of where the drains and the cables run and what depth the foundation reached.

Questions we get asked

Can I project manage it myself and use you only for the building work?

Yes, and some people do it well. Be honest with yourself about what you are taking on: the sequencing, the chasing, the arbitration between trades, and the risk that sits in the gaps between separate appointments. With building experience, or with time and patience in quantity, it can save money. With a full time job and no experience, the saving is often smaller than the delays cost.

Is a main contractor more expensive than arranging it all yourself?

The co-ordination is priced rather than free, so on paper it looks that way. In practice the comparison rarely runs how people expect, because the separate route carries costs that appear in nobody’s quotation: the weeks lost to a disagreement, the trade you have to re-book, the unit ordered to a dimension that changed. We will not put a figure on that, because we cannot evidence one. What we will say is that our price includes the co-ordination, and you should check whether the price you are comparing it against does.

What do we actually sign?

A written contract carrying the scope, the specification, the price, the stage payments, the programme, the variation procedure and the defects provisions. There are standard forms written for domestic building work of exactly this kind. Which document matters less than the fact that everything you were told verbally appears somewhere inside it.

What happens if we disagree about something?

The written record comes out first, and most disagreements dissolve at that point because they were misunderstandings rather than disputes. Where one does not, we put our position and what we propose to do about it in writing, and there is a complaints procedure on this site setting out the steps and the timescales. Nobody enjoys that conversation. The ones that go badly are the ones nobody wrote anything down about.