Quotes

All three builders who were invited to tender came back with quotes. They're in the general ballpark of what we were expecting, though slightly higher than we would have wished for, with about 10% of a difference between the highest and lowest. We haven't sat down with the detailed bills of quantities yet to determine exactly what each one is quoting for, but we're due to get the documents today so will be doing this soon.

More anon.

Real live builder

Today we had First Contact with someone who actually works for an actual firm which builds actual things. He was working on putting our quote together and was looking for information on the current state of the house, and which bits simply need to be ripped out as opposed to demolished.

It's not really news. It's just that we've been waiting so long that contact with a builder is like a first glimpse of the Promised Land.

Tender ho!

Unbeknownst to me, it turns out that the engineer has issued the revised drawings to three contractors of his acquaintance. The deadline for responses is Friday week. This is slightly different from the original plans, in that the whole point of an independent engineer was to have someone completely separate from and unknown to the builders he supervises. But on the other, we don't have to go sending sheafs of documents out to random builders: woo-hoo!

We'll still be doing the selecting of a contractor from the responses we get.

The latest drawings had to be only slightly corrected, but now we've decided we should add a sink to the utility room, if that's practical. Here's hoping changes like this won't become too much of a bad habit: especially after building starts and they become Expensive.