Before knocking the existing house down we had to disconnect the utilities. Water, oil and BT were simple, but electricity caused our first delay. It took 8 weeks from when we first contacted EDF to actually getting it disconnected, so it's worth organising well in advance as this delayed our build start date. We decided to build an electrical kiosk to provide an electricity supply for the duration of the build and to supply the office, and we plan to utilise this as our permanent supply when the new house is built as this will avoid having to pay EDF to come back again.
We've had a log cabin office built in the back garden to run the business from, but it also provides a useful base from which we can manage the build. From watching far too many Grand Designs we realised it would be best to be on-site as much as possible, but rather than live in a caravan on-site, we cheated and decided to rent a house 20mins away! 9 months in a caravan was not something we fancied with two young kids!! (or without come to think of it).
We lined up the demolition to start the day after the electricity was finally cut off. We'd used a local chap (Charles Hastings from CH Mini Digger Hire) to dig in the electrics for the office and he gave us a good price to demolish the house so we happily employed him to do the work.. He did a great job. He kept the site very tidy and he also found a local farmer who took the rubble away for nothing. We looked into having a crusher so we could use/sell the crushed rubble, but by the time you'd hired the machine and an operator it was not worth while financially, so to get the rubble removed at nil cost was great.
We stripped the clay pantiles and concrete roof tiles (with the kind help of our next door neighbour) before the demolition started and Charles separated out the wood and metal during demolition. There weren't enough roof tiles for us to re-use, but we found a reclamation yard that gave us 55p each for the clay pantiles and 25p for the concrete tiles so it was well worth the effort. We also managed to recoup about £300 for the metal at the local metal merchant, Mellor Metals (mostly for the copper pipes).
We have decided to send out at least 5 tenders for each part of the build and, where ever possible, send out to contractors that have been recommended to us. That way we can be sure of getting reliable tradespeople at the most competitive prices. Potton supply a list of previously used contractors in the manual, but recommendations from friends etc are invaluable as they tend to be for local builders.
The tender documents we have sent out have been based loosely upon the example tender documents supplied by Potton in their project management file, but we have used our own format and added more detail..
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