Everything you were told, kept where you can find it again.
A build throws off two years of decisions, promises, prices and certificates. Most of it lands in email, some of it in a drawer, and the rest of it in your head. This is where it goes instead.
Project tools
A set of tools that help you deliver the key elements of your build.
Assessing a plot. Appointing the design team. Building and controlling your budget. Procuring every subcontract package, and reading the numbers that come back. Setting a programme the whole team can work to. Discharging the health and safety obligations that land on you as a self builder.
Each one is built for a self builder rather than a contractor. Below, what each of them does.
A plot assessment
Every plot you look at judged against the same list, with what you found on each one recorded beside it.
The reason you walked away from the third plot is still there in front of you when the sixth one looks perfect.
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A budget
Every cost on the build in one place, grouped the way the work is actually bought.
You find out what a decision costs while you can still change it, not at the end.
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A programme
The order the work has to happen in, with dates against it.
When the roof slips two weeks, it shows you what else moves and who needs telling.
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Enquiries and orders
One document per trade asking every builder the same questions, and the record of what you then agreed with each of them.
Prices you can actually compare, and no argument later about what was agreed or what is still owed.
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Quotes side by side
Every quote for a trade in one sheet, with what each one left out.
The cheapest price is usually the one missing something. This is where you see what.
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Safety paperwork
Method statements and risk assessments for the work that falls between the trades.
Nobody else writes these for you, and you are the one responsible for them.
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A site diary
What happened each day, who was on site, and photographs of what is about to be covered up.
Fifteen years on, somebody opening that wall can see what is behind it and where.
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The completion pack
One PDF holding the certificates, warranties, drawings and photographs from the whole build.
Two years later, when somebody asks for the file, there is a file.
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What it holds
Eight parts, met roughly in this order. It is here so you can see nothing is missing, not so you read it.
Before you own anything
What you can afford, what actually matters to you about a plot, and every plot you are looking at judged against the same list.
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The facts about this build
Where it is, what it is, who is on it.
Land and legal
What you found on the plot, what the paperwork says, and every place the two disagree.
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Design and consents
Who you appointed, every decision about the house, the conditions you have to discharge, and which revision it was built to.
See what this part holds
Commercial
The budget, the enquiries, the quotes and the orders.
Health and safety
Method statements, inductions, and what left site as waste.
Site
The diary, the programme, the meetings and what you found when you walked the house.
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Your documents
Everything handed to you along the way, filed where it belongs.
What you leave with
You keep it whether you stay subscribed or not.
When the build is done the whole thing comes out as one file: the certificates, the warranties, the drawings and the photographs, in an order somebody else can follow. That is the thing a lender, a solicitor or a buyer asks you for, and it is the reason the record was worth keeping while you were too busy to keep it.
Your own files come back exactly as you put them in, alongside it.