House extension budget planning

Before most home owners decide on engaging a professional house extension building designer or architect, they often need some form of house extension budget plan to see if their desires or wish list matches their available funds.

Regretfully though, most home owners are in a chicken and egg situation as often exact building costs cannot be established until the design drawings and specifications have been completed which will involve the client or homeowner in fees.

A house extension budget plan could be established if the house extension designer is pretty experienced and generally up to date with the physical build costs of their previous house extension schemes. Even so, this could still vary widely from the inception budget cost planning to the final constructions scheme as it is not until this later stage that most of the exact detail and overlapping works can be identified and scheduled. Therefore any house extension budget plan must allow a 15% degree of margin for error.

Another mistake many home owners make is to forget about all the fees, Service suppers fees for moving meters for example or even VAT. Budget planning for any house extension is not an exact science and a good contingency sum of ‘readily available money’ needs to be on hand during the works. It is surprising how easy it is to forget that installing a new compliant wiring system within the extension suddenly requires the existing property to be rewired or partly renewed for the sake of compliance within the electrical legislation for example.

As a guide most house extension budget plans need to be flexible and always be on the side of caution with regard to added or increased costs. It may be possible to adjust other budgets along the way if a few unexpected costs for additional works arise along the way. This could mean having a less glamorous kitchen for the sake of having some localised underpinning due to deficient existing foundations. This is just one example of many situations that can and often do arise on any house extension building project.