Our Build

This site exists because of one real build: a 30m2 rear kitchen extension on a 1930s house in Oxfordshire, project managed by the owner, documented from the first architect sketch to the final certificate. These chapters are that build, told straight: what happened, what it cost, and what went wrong.

The builder quoted £45,500. The construction bill, kitchen excluded, finished at £122,150. Add the kitchen itself at £58,986 and the whole thing came to £181,136. About fifteen of those months were spent with trades on site. Counting back to the first drawings and forward to the day building control signed the job off, the project stayed open for roughly thirty-five months.

None of that was the plan, and that is the reason these chapters exist. Most guidance describes a phase in the abstract, so you reach your own foundations, or your own steel order, with no sense of what normal looks like and no sense of what a warning sign looks like. Reading somebody else's build in sequence is the cheapest way to find out before you commit any money to your own.

Each chapter carries photographs taken on site while the work was happening, the invoices that were actually paid, and the parts that went badly. A steel order nobody had placed. A ridge beam quietly swapped for timber mid-build, caught by the building control officer, and reinstated in steel a week later. A bifold supplier that went into liquidation holding a five-figure deposit, and the credit card claim that recovered it. Those failures cost real time and real money, and they teach more than the weeks when everything went to plan.

The chapters follow the same eight phases as the task tree on this site, in the same order. Read a chapter to see how a phase played out in practice, then work the matching branch of the tree when your own build gets there.