House Alterations: Programme

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We often are asked by our clients if their project will be ready in time for Christmas. The industry standard answer to this question is "Which Christmas?". Facetiousness aside, if you want to ensure proper management of your construction project, it is important to have a good handle on timescales. Here are some tips:

You probably have heard that planning applications take 8 weeks, and that finding a builder is not that easy, so you might expect a project programme to look like this:

 This is 9 months for the full project.... but in reality this is very hard to achieve. First of all, this assumes the project starts TODAY. Unfortunately there is the small issue of fees, resourcing, and a good site survey to be sorted first.

And then the design process, being an evolution of ideas towards a theoretical concept, generally requires changes.

Next, the planning stage is always longer than 8 weeks. 8 weeks is the time local authorities hope to achieve, from validation to determination. So if they want to, they can request further information "before the appliction can be validated", adding time without reducing their precious 8 weeks.

Assuming there are no tricky technical aspects to the design, the next potential for delay could be the biggest: Do we have a builder at the ready?

Increasingly we are finding that builders are so busy that they simply cannot manage more work. Our solution is to involve them at a much earlier stage, but it still adds time to the project. They always need 4 weeks to look at the job.

Adding in those adjustments, our programme is more like this:

As you can see here, without taking into account those inevitable but unexpected delays, our more realistic programme is expected to run for 13 months from project inception, to completion on site.

So now it is clear - this christmas is out!

That said, we do have all manner of tricks up our sleeves to accelerate programmes and reduce the overall project duration. The previous page showed that quicker projects may come at the expense of quality or cost - not always an easy choice. We are happy to help you plan your programme for a potential project. Contact us here for more information.

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