Saturday 9 March 2013

Planning & Control for Self Build Projects

By Tim Karpinski


You may be acquainted with the benefits of a self build house. It will enable you to have a customized home that meets your wishes and specifications rather than have an 'off the shelf ' house from a developer. For the details about the benefits and what you need to do there is a wealth of self build informationin the Vision Development blog.

Let's make the assumption that you've a budget for the project and have a desired timescale for completion. How are you going to complete your self build house project inside time and budget?

You can use the calculator on our web site to help work out the budget for your project. This should be done by building a spreadsheet for each task or purchase in the project. You should add on a contingency (say 10%) to cover cost overruns and unexpected costs. As you begin to work with an architect or designer then you may start to refine your budget. The precision of your costing will improve as you replace first estimates with real quotations from providers and building trades.

One technique of controlling self build costs as the self build project advances is to track work finished and actual spend for each task or purchase on a spreadsheet. You can estimate completion percentage and record this and also enter stage payments to suppliers and contractors. This will permit you to compare how much has actually been spent to the proportion of the budget for the work which has been finished. In the spreadsheet you'd be able to sum the finished budgets and real spend across the entire project to permit you to compare what has been actually spent against what should have been spent when looking at real and estimated completion of jobs and purchases.

Also , you should track the completion of the various jobs and purchases against a schedule. When you have completed the costing spreadsheet you must prepare a plan showing the start and finish date for each task. This may also be done as a spreadsheet. You can mix the info of the plan and the costing spreadsheet and this can give you an indicator of how spend will be phased over the self build project. This is very helpful if you need to have drawdown financing arrangements from a mortgage provider. You need to also monitor actual completion of tasks against the plan.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment