HOW MUCH WILL IT COST TO SELF BUILD?
( PART 2 )

As with most of the other decisions you will make throughout the project, your approach to the latter stages of the building process can have a dramatic effects on costs.

Here are some of the items which, depending on the choices you make, can have major implications on your budget:

A nice new kitchen can cost you £2500, or it can cost you £25,000. The difference choosing one of those prices over the other makes to the project is £25,000. If you opted for the £25,000 kitchen you would probably not see a £22,500 increase in the “end value” of your property (maybe £10,000).

It’s easy to spend £15,000 on a kitchen, but if your build budget is £60,000 then a £15,000 kitchen would take up 25% of your TOTAL BUDGET! – This is just not practical, and if you are heading in that direction, give yourselves a sharp smack on the wrists and stop it! – If your total budget is £60,000 then you should be looking to spend £4,000 - £6,000 (max) on your kitchen. In other words aim to keep your kitchen costs BELOW 10% of your total costs. - With that percentage getting smaller, the higher the build budget. For a £200,000 house you should be able to get a very nice kitchen for around £12,000, or 6% of your budget.

You can get a nice bathroom suite for less than £500, or you can pay £5000. Again, the dearer one will not necessarily pay for itself in increased “end value” of the house. So be sensible. In a £60,000 budget leave about £2,000 max for “bathrooms”. That includes en suites and w/c. If you shop around you will get some nice equipment for that sort of money. As you head up towards the more expensive projects you can afford to be a little more flexible, but if you start to spend more than about £8,000 on bathroom suites on anything up to a 5 bed house, you are probably spending more than you need to.

Prices vary from around £5 / sq m and go up to £80 / sq ft (or even more) for tiles. Depending on how much tiling you are thinking about doing, the implications of picking the dearer end can run into thousands of pounds. If you are fully tiling three bathrooms, including floors, plus your kitchen, utility room, and possibly hallway, you could end up using over 200 sq m of tiles. The implications of using a tile at either end of the price scale would be a difference in the cost of the tiles themselves of up to £15,000!

On top of that there is the cost of fitting the tiles. For basic tiling you could pay as little as £12 / sq m. For complicated patterns you could pay £50 / sq m. The cost implications at either end of that scale are £7,600! – So, add the 2 together, and you have a range of well over £20,000 in the potential costs for tiling.

3) Doing the painting yourselves can cost you more money in the long run! – If your painting skills are not up to the job, but you are determined to do it anyway, you could end up making such a mess of it that it actually devalues your new home (I have seen examples of this!). If you are not confident in producing at least a reasonable quality job, get someone in to do it.

4) “Colours add cost”: Especially if you are using sub contract Painter and Decorators. – Changing colours for each room takes time. It means cleaning out brushes, rollers, trays etc. Coloured paint also tends to be more expensive than white or magnolia to buy.

5) Negotiate: If you use one supplier for paint for the whole house you will be giving them a substantial amount of business. Use this fact to negotiate “Trade prices” where you can.

(Note: If you want to look into what is available to you in respect of lighting design, you could visit a Self Build or Trade exhibition. There tend to be a good number of lighting companies who use the exhibitions to reach their markets and let them see some of the products actually working).

You may not think that your choices of internal doors, a set ofstairsand a few bits of skirtingsandarchitraves could have any sort of substantial effect on your budgets, but they can! – Self Builders tend to want their houses to “look” better than the “big developers” properties. The most obvious way they can do this is with the “finishes”. In other words “the bits everyone sees” as soon as they walk in to the house. Apart from the kitchens and bathrooms, the “joinery items” tend to be the most obvious.

“Outside” there are just as many options for you to “spend or save” on as there are “inside”. Including:

The cheapest options will usually be gravel. Depending on where you are in the UK, the different types of gravel will vary in price. Generally the “grey” stone is cheaper than the “golden” stone. – It is better if you buy gravel in “full loads” rather than “25kg” or “1 tonne” bags. You could pay in the region of half the bagged price if you buy in bulk.

Next up the range will usually be Tarmacadam, then Brick paving / Imprinted concrete. The costs of all these products vary too much for me to give you any sorts of figures. Prices not only vary by the materials themselves, but also by the shape, size and slope of the drive, together with any special features, or drainage requirements, along with other factors. You will usually need to get quotes from local contractors to get accurate prices.

As a rule, if you are on a “tightish” budget, consider gravel or tarmac. If you are more flexible then you can consider going for imprinted concrete drives or brick paved drives.

Similar to driveways, gravel tends to be the cheapest option, but you could also consider using one of the hundreds of designs of “slabs”. These vary from around £5/ sq metre to £50 / sq metre. On top of that you have the labour cost for laying them of around £10 / sq m and usually a sand / cement bed costing around 50p / sq m.

Seeding is usually the cheapest option, but if you need to buy topsoil in before you can seed, then turf may be a better option. Seeding alone will cost next to nothing. Turfing is also pretty cheap, starting at as little as £1.50 / sq metre (at some times of year). Laying the turf will cost around £1.50 - £2.50 / sq yd. The best turf may cost up to around £5 / sq metre to buy.

Small plants are obviously usually going to be the cheapest to buy. If you can find a local Garden centre or landscaping supplier who can provide everything you need, you may be able to come to some terms over discounts.

For a small garden, a couple of hundred pounds will get you enough small plants to give your garden a bit of interest. £1,000 would get you a good selection of plants with some nice specimens enough to give interest to a medium sized garden

Over the past few years this has become one of the most popular ways of upgrading or improving a garden.

It doesn’t have to be too expensive, doesn’t take long to build and requires little maintenance (a coat of stain once a year on average). Costs will vary dramatically however depending on your design and what components you use.

You should be able to “buy and build” enough decking for 2 people to sunbath on for less than £1,000 but the cost can easily go up from there to well over £10,000 for a “feature decking” large enough to throw a party on.

“Post and rail” fencing is about the cheapest type of fencing. You simply buy treated posts (usually 3” x 3” or 4” x 4”) of the height you want the fence to be, plus about 18” to “go in the ground”, and either hammer them in, concrete them in, or use one of the metal “spikes” which you can buy in most DIY stores, into which they slot (if you use a spike you don’t need to allow the extra 18”).

You set the posts at roughly 2m centres, but there is nothing hard and fast about the distance between posts as long as you don’t space them TOO far apart and weaken the fence structure too much. You then simply nail treated “rails” between the posts. Rails can be anything from 2” x 1” to 6” x 1”, or 2” x 2” to 6” x 2”. The cost of this type of fencing will be around  £2 to £6 of pounds per post (depending on the length) and up to £2.50 / metre for the rails. Spikes will cost a few pounds each, and the same goes for concrete for each post.

You may be able to construct this type of fencing yourselves, but it shouldn’t cost much to get someone in to do it.

The next step up in fencing would be panel fencing. Usually panels come in 3’ or 6’ heights, and 6’ lengths. Basic 3’ panels can cost from less than £10 each, and the prices then go up to over £80 for 6’ high quality feature panels. Again you need a post, concrete, or a spike (for fitting panel fencing, unless you know what you are doing, you may not get away with “hammering” a post in. - The “positioning” needs to be accurate and that is difficult to achieve without concreting or using a spike). You need a little more expertise to be able to put up one of these fences, so you may decide to get it put up professionally. Labour costs for this will be from about £10 per “post and panel” upwards.

Next comes the “hand built” fencing (which really needs a professional fencer to guarantee a good job. Posts are set in concrete normally, and rails attached to the posts. Timber “slats” are them fixed, lapped over each other along the length of the fence. This fencing is ideal where you have a sloping site, where a panel type fence may start at ground level at one end, but because of the slope, end up a distance above the ground at the other end. The slats can be set to follow any undulations in the ground. You can then leave the top following the same line, or cut it off to a “straight line” finish.

Costs for this type of fencing will start at about £35 / running metre and go up from there (supply and fit).

This is about the most expensive type of “boundary treatment” generally used. You need to excavate along the full length for a foundation, pour concrete (which on a slope may need to be “stepped”, increasing the cost). You then have to build brickwork below ground (for which you can use “cheaper” bricks as they won’t generally be seen). As the brickwork approaches ground level you change the type of brick to the one you want to be seen, then above ground level you will need to install a dpc (to reduce the possibility of mould growing up the wall).

High, or long walls will normally have “piers” or pillars” every few metres to help to strengthen the overall structure.

Brick garden walls will normally be built “1 brick wide” (which actually means 2 bricks “used”. – The term “1 brick” refers to the length of the brick, not the width, but bricks are usually laid with the longest face visible to the front, so they are only “1/2 a brick deep”).

For each square meter of wall, with waste and piers you will probably use up to 150 bricks (don’t quote me on that – it depends on your wastage and the size and number of your piers). So if you have a garden wall of say 10m x 1.8m, plus say 0.5m underground, you could use around 3500 bricks. At £300 / 1000 to buy and about the same to lay, plus the excavation costs, concrete, mortar, dpc, and possibly a coping, you could be looking at a total of getting on for £3,000 for the cost of the wall, and more if you use a “coping stone” to top it off.

Gates and railings come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. A basic 3’ timber gate could be bought for as little as £25. But if you start to talk about wrought iron fencing and large “feature” remote controlled wrought iron gates you can easily start to pay from a couple of thousand pounds upwards.

 It’s not difficult to get prices for these items. You can often buy them readymade, or you can get quotes for what you want, for local Gates and Railing manufacturers. Go and see some examples of their work before you place an order.