Ask three builders the same question. Then write down what you agreed.
Most self-builders send a drawing and a phone call, and get back three numbers that cannot be compared because nobody was asked the same thing. This writes one document per trade: what to price, line by line, with what is not in that package named and pointed at the package that carries it.
The expensive thing is not a high price. It is the job nobody thought was theirs.
How one enquiry gets written, from a real one on the build you can look round.
Step 1 of 5
Tell it the trade, and when you want prices back
A handful of answers. Which package, which part of it, the day you are sending it, the day you want prices by.
Tick what is in the envelope: the drawings, the programme, the ground report. The list prints on the enquiry, so a builder can check the envelope against it and ask before pricing round a gap.
Step 2 of 5
The schedule is already written
What comes out is a document that knows the trade it is going to: the schedule of what to price is already written out for that package, item by item, with the unit each one is measured in.
It is the same list your budget is built on, so when a price comes back it lands on the line it was asked for.
Step 3 of 5
It says what is not in the package
Every enquiry carries the list of what is not in it, each line naming the package that carries it instead. Anything on it that a builder has priced anyway is money you gave away twice.
Anything on it that everybody assumed somebody else was doing is the gap that turns up on site in week nine, when the answer is expensive.
Step 4 of 5
What you know about your own plot
The last part is yours and nobody else can write it: the lane is single track, the hours are a planning condition and not a preference, there is a field drain on a 1970s plan that nobody has dug for.
You write it once and it prints into every enquiry. A builder who is told that prices it. A builder who finds it in week three charges you for it.
Step 5 of 5
Send it, and keep what they were sent
Word documents you can edit before they go, or PDFs if you would rather send something fixed.
A copy of exactly what each builder was sent is kept against your record, so nine months later there is no argument about what they were asked.
And then what you agreed
What goes wrong after the quotes are in is that nobody wrote down what was placed, what changed, what has been certified, and what is still being held back.
Step 1 of 3
The appointment or the order
A price is not an agreement. The appointment or order itself: blank to fill in by hand, or already filled in from what you have recorded, on your own letterhead.
Step 2 of 3
Every change, with the dates
Every build changes. Each change gets a number, a description in your own words, how it was priced, and the dates it was raised, priced and agreed.
That is the difference between a variation and an argument.
Step 3 of 3
The money you are owed back
If you hold three per cent of every valuation, half of it comes back at completion and half of it a year later: on a build with a dozen trades that is thousands of pounds, owed to you, on twenty-four separate dates.
Nobody sends you a reminder. This is the list.
What you get out
The enquiry
A Word document on your letterhead, or a PDF, with the priced schedule for that trade in it.
A covering letter
Listing everything going with it, so nothing arrives unexplained.
And the record
Who you sent it to, when, and a copy of exactly what they were sent.