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Posted by Nehmo Sergheyev on May 22, 2006, 10:02 am
You met Builder A in the second paragraph. You could have just gone
with him then and saved everybody a bunch of trouble.
--
(||) Nehmo (||)
CWatters wrote:
> I'm having a new one off house built. Here is how I selected a builder. I
> may have the numbers slightly wrong but it went something like this....
>
> Long before we needed to select one I was out looking at other projects. Any
> nice house being built I would stop and chat to whoever was on site. Several
> builders showed me around houses that they were working on. The quality
> difference was amazing but so was their attitude. Usually I asked a few
> questions that I half knew the answer to. Sometimes I got the answer "oh you
> don't want to worry about that - we take care of all that". Humm. In such
> cases their card was usually torn up before I got back in the car. Others
> were much more responsive and they explained how they did things and why
> they did it their way. Of around 12 builders I met, two impressed me enough
> to go on the short list. One was very keen as he was just finishing a superb
> house down the road from our site - lets call him Builder A.
>
> For the short list my architect recommended two companies and my Quantity
> Surveyor also recommended two. So we had six in total. We sent out an
> initial letter to all six together with a 3D CAD drawing/render showing what
> the house was like and a one page description. We asked them to let us know
> if they were interested in bidding. I think 5 said yes and 1 declined.
>
> I then went to visit the 5 builders. I asked to see two projects - a house
> they had completed and a house in progress. I guess I spent about two hours
> with each builder. I was able to cross one off the list - they mainly built
> small estates of nearly identical design and of a lower standard than I was
> looking for.
>
> So we sent out four drawing packs (each of which contained about 40-50
> drawings and a specification that ran to 50 pages). We asked for sealed bids
> to be returned in 4 weeks (or was it 6 weeks?).
>
> Most bids arrived on the last day. Three were nearly identical and were
> within 1% of the figues that my QS had estimated. One was about 5% lower.
> This bid was from builder A who had been keen to get the job and who had
> impressed me when I met him. Due to the complexity of the project my
> quantity surveyor wanted to check the winning bid to ensure nothing had been
> missed - it hadn't so he got the job.
>
> The project is now around 75% completed and our builder continues to
> impress. The quality is about the best I've seen.
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