First home renovation project - complete newbie

euromike

thank you once again Phil.

The thing is, it's the first time I'm buying a flat in the UK and I'm really new to all of this. Up until Monday I was under the impression that if I pay over 1mln EUR for a flat, I'm free to do whatever I please with it. I've been proven wrong of course;), I'm trying to catch up on all these things quickly, planning permissions, building regulations, freeholder consent, hiring a structural engineer, minding fire regulations... Hopefully the list won't grow any longer! It's a lot of money and effort just to knock down a few square meters of cardboard walls though!;)

Where I come from choosing the right builders is considered make or break for such a project. This is the reason why that was the first thing I did. Now you make it sound like once I've got the detailed spec of all the works, "the only difference is the price", to quote you. But is it, really? A friend of mine was getting builders to re-do his bathroom. He instructed them to lay rectangular tiles horizontally, came back after a few hours, sure enough, tiles were fixed on the wall, vertically. So they managed to get something that fundamental wrong. Again, this may not be a common thing in the UK, but in assessing builder's quality I'd be looking at things such as: are walls and ceilings exactly straight? is the paint applied without visible changes of direction? are all right angles (corners etc) exactly right? are spaces between tiles of exactly the same width? etc, etc, etc... Not that I'm complaining but the quality of some of the buy-to-let flats that I've occupied over years, most of them new or recent builds from major developers (Galliards etc) left much to be desired. Surely if builders make major mistakes like with my mate's bathroom tiles, there must be quite a lot of variation between qualities of work of different builders? Which is the reason why I'm not that keen on just taking the spec, showing it so several companies and just choosing the cheapest. My approach might be completely flawed though, and I'm happy to be corrected.

Have a good weekend