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. And when you place the work, it holds what each firm is contracted to do, everything you changed your mind about since, what you have paid and what you are still owed back.
A real enquiry, on the reader’s own letterhead. The section below is what is inside it.
How it gets there
Which 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.
What is going out with it
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.
What you know about your own site
The access, the ground, the hours, the neighbour who works nights. You write it once and it prints into every enquiry you send.
The answers that produce the document. There are not many of them.
That is the whole of the work. 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.
The priced schedule for one trade, already written out.
It is the same list your budget is built on, which is the part that matters later: when a price comes back it lands on the line it was asked for, and the sheet that compares three quotes is comparing answers to the same question.
What it saves you
The expensive thing on a self-build is not a high price. It is the job nobody thought was theirs.
What is not in this package, and who has it instead.
Every enquiry carries that list. 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. Working out those boundaries is what a quantity surveyor is for, and they are written into the document before you send it.
And it asks for the things a builder can honestly answer and you can honestly compare: their daywork rates, the percentage they add to a subcontractor, what their price assumes about drying time, which attendances they expect from you. Not a fixed price and a handshake.
What you know about your own plot, printed into every enquiry.
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. A builder who is told that prices it. A builder who finds it in week three charges you for it.
And then what you agreed
A price is not an agreement. What goes wrong on a self-build after the quotes are in is that nobody wrote down what was actually placed, what changed afterwards, what has been certified, and what is still being held back.
The appointment or order itself — blank to fill in by hand, or already filled in from what you have recorded.
Every change, in the words you used at the time, with the dates.
Every build changes. The garden office becomes a separate building on the application; the materials condition has to be discharged. Each one 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.
Money you are owed back, with the date it falls due.
And the one nobody remembers. 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
Word documents you can edit before they go, or PDFs if you would rather send something fixed. Both come down as a zip, and 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.
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.
What went to whom, and when.