What Our Build Really Cost

Every figure here is a real amount paid on the documented build. The totals below are VAT-inclusive pocket cost, exactly as they left the bank account. Amounts that were quoted but never invoiced are not counted, refunds and credits are subtracted, and nothing has been tidied up to make a neater story.

Inside the totals: the groundwork, the shell, the roof, the glazing, every trade, the utility meter moves, and the kitchen itself, meaning units, worktops, appliances, lighting and the utility room. The dining end of the room is out. A table, chairs, a sofa and a television are furnishing rather than building work, so £7,998 of it has been excluded from every total below. Selling the old kitchen appliances brought in £498.50, and that is credited back rather than quietly dropped.

The number most people want is the gap between the quote and the bill. The builder quoted £45,500 for his part of the work, and that quote was accepted. It was also a single line on a spreadsheet that eventually ran to three hundred rows. It never covered the architect, building control, the structural calculations, the steel fabrication, the roof windows, the bifolds, the drainage, the screed, the electrician, the plumber, the plasterer, the tiler, the painter, or moving the gas and electricity meters. Construction, kitchen excluded, landed at £122,150. The kitchen added £58,986 on top of that.

Read all of it as 2021 to 2023 money, spent on a 55m2 reworked footprint in Oxfordshire. Material and labour prices have moved since, so lifting the bottom line straight into your own budget will mislead you. The durable lesson is the shape of the spend: which categories exist at all, how much of the total sits outside the builder's quote, and how quickly the small lines mount up once every trade is engaged separately.

The category totals below are summed from an itemised ledger kept while the work was going on. Every invoice, every payment, every refund, with dates and notes on where the spend diverged from what had been quoted. That full spreadsheet is available further down in exchange for an email address, and it is the same file used to keep the build honest at the time.