Advice on self build and what to engage an engineer for

bert n ernie

Hi all,

We are hoping to build a 130sq metre house, greenfield site to nearly passive principles. Have a planning permission in place on the land, but have decided to change the design of the house and are in pre planning discussions at the moment with planning department re same.

We have designed the house ourselves, (husband is a civil engineer) with a set of preliminary design drawings done.

With our previous permission we unfortunately believed our architect when we were told that the house would come in at X amount, when in fact the cheapest quote we got was over twice the price. Hence the change of house type.

This time around we are engaging a QS in advance of going for planning. We had also planned on using a BER energy consultant and a structural engineer.

We had sent some emails to structural engineering firms asking them to quote us to do the following;

Complete the detail / structural design,prep the tender documents, ensure compliance with the building regs, act as PSDP (project supervisor design process). Preparation of construction drawings, site supervision and certification as required.

We have had very few responses, are we making a big error somewhere here?
All advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks a lot.

Gumbo

If going to passive standard, then you need someone with this experience. Not everyone is qualified to approach the works with passive in mind, and they really should be involved from the start including the current preliminary design stages.