Having never had to renovate a house before and our our only knowledge of interior design having been gleaned from the myriad of home improvement programmes.  We spent the last few weeks have this week being trying to nail down the costs for all the work we need to do during this first phase of work.

Now all we have read says to get 3 quotes and compare them… We have quite tight budget, having recently purchased the house, so its been really tricky to balance the books especially as there seems to be so much disparity between all the the different quotes.   makes sense, but is actually impossible to do for a number of reasons:

1. Tradesmen are very busy. So hard to get through to on the phone, hard to get appointments with and in some cases, some fail to even show up even after you have managed the first two tasks.
2. Quotes are not in plain English.  We tried to make it simple for us to compare by putting together a spec of what it was we were asking each of the contractors for (it also included pictures and locations of where plugs, switches,  radiators etc needed to go.
3. Some can start soon others the waiting list can be really long!!

Despite this, we still managed to get a few quotes that were not within range of each other!

Cheapest doesn’t always mean the best, and we’ve found long lead times for some contractors.

Hopefully, we’ll be in a position to confirm everything soon… really keen to get  a start date!