Ask anyone who has lived through a badly run build what actually went wrong, and it is almost never the standard of the work. It is the fortnight the house sat untouched because the electrician could not come until the plasterer had been, and the plasterer was waiting on someone else entirely.
Why the handovers are the hard part
A domestic extension needs groundworkers, bricklayers, carpenters, a roofer, an electrician, a plumber, a plasterer and a decorator, roughly in that order, and several of them need to come back a second time. Every one of those transitions is a chance for a week to disappear.
When each trade is booked separately by the homeowner, or picked up ad hoc by a builder as the job goes along, nobody owns the sequence. The trades are not the problem. The absence of anyone whose job it is to make Tuesday follow Monday is.
How the trades are organised here
- Building. Our own core team — groundworks, foundations, brickwork and structure.
- Carpentry. Through the CC Carpentry division of our sister company, covering structural timber through to bespoke joinery and finishing.
- Plumbing and electrical. Through the CC Plumbing and CC Electrical divisions, so services are designed in rather than fitted around.
The practical difference is not that these people are better than the trades down the road. It is that they are on the same programme, they have worked together before, and when a date moves there is one person who has to fix it rather than four people who each have to be phoned.
Ask who is doing the electrics and the plumbing, and ask whether their dates are in the programme or still to be arranged. It is a completely reasonable question, it takes ten seconds, and the answer tells you a great deal about how the job will actually run.
Accredited where it counts
Gas Safe registered and NICEIC approved. That matters most for the work you will never see again once the plaster goes on — and it is why we would rather the services came through people we work with every week than through whoever was free that Thursday.
Managing it
Led by Nick and our project managers, every job runs to a written programme with the approvals on it as well as the build, so you can see what has to happen before a start date rather than being told one. If something slips, you hear it from us before you notice it on site.