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Submit plansWe are building in Scotland. We have planning and architects drawings. The QS is quoting £3.2k /metre squared for a 220m squared 4 bed single level house. When we started looking at a potential project 5 years ago the costs were nearer £2k /metre squared. We appreciate prices are currently at a peak due to the current global situation. In addition We do have a lot of glass and wood cladding in the build currently and may have to compromise on the size of some of the glass panes to reduce the cost. The costings in your magazine seem to sadly be very out of date with current real life costings. Do you have suggestions on how (as non-builders) we could reduce the costs without compromising on the quality?
Hi Susan,
Thank you for your question. I have asked one of our experts to comment and will get back to you as soon as possible.
Hi
I heard the roof is a good place to reduce costs.
Hi Susan,
The price you’ve stated does seem very high, even taking into account recent price hikes, material shortages and a boom in construction work. You say that you have planning and architects drawings.
I assume these are fully detailed technical drawings? In which case why are you still looking at prices on a £/sqm rate? Pricing on a £/sqm basis is fine for initial discussions but a dangerous way to price a project once you have plans that start to identify how the building will be built as there are so many variables where pricing is expensive in one part but not so much in another.
With all the technical drawings available you would be better off going out to tender to contractors, that will accurately price the build for you. Sometimes having consultants pricing a project can add a number of risk factors so they feel there is enough margin to cover any high prices that you may receive.
So to get more accuracy you need them to price for the actual work or go out to tender and responses to show you a complete breakdown of where the money is being spent. You will then know if your windows or the cladding are the expensive elements and need to be reduced; or perhaps you have poor ground conditions so the money is going into foundations so you may want to consider alternative structural proposals.
Without this level of breakdown you are simply guessing and find that your assumed reductions don’t make much of a difference to the final price. You should also consider how you are procuring your build? Will you give everything to one main contractor to build? Or will you manage some of the work?
The main contractor will apply an overhead and profit element to everything they deal with, whereas if you can manage some of the work you won’t have this uplift and still maintain a high level of quality. In fact many of our clients prefer this route of managing their own trades and as with the majority of self-builders end up with a higher quality of build.