As material and labour costs continue to rise, how can you approach a building project without overshooting your budget, and without regretting the moment you decided to knock down that wall and build a new kitchen?
Kevin McCloud, the 66-year-old host of the long-running property design show and presenter of the Grand Designs Live event has seen every error under the sun. He tells Kasia Delgado his simple golden rules for doing work to your home, and the traps to avoid for a successful project (and calmer nerves).
Don’t order your new bathroom without testing the quality first
If you want to go with a particular bathroom or kitchen supplier, and they’re advertising 20 per cent off, it’s worth thinking about why they’re cheaper.
What you do is order a coat hook, door handle or towel rail from them – something reasonably small – just to see whether it is decent or whether it’s going to fall apart. It may take much longer to actually place an order for the big-ticket item of bathroom or kitchen, but what you need to do is establish trust in the quality of what the company is doing.
Don’t trust internet reviews for tradespeople
Online reviews are really hard to validate; the builder might have just got their mates to review them. How do you know, just because somebody says they’re a member of a guild of this, or a federation of that, what that stands for? Usually, those are insurance schemes, promotional organisations that say to the trade: “If you pay us £500 a year, you can get a stamp and you can use our logo”.
There’s only one way, and that’s to ask everyone you know for recommendations. Pretty much everyone who lives in a home will have had something fixed in it at some point, so ask your neighbour, your friend, your colleague: “Have you got a good plumber? Is he any good? Does he turn up? Does he ring you back? What’s he like in an emergency?” And when you find that good person, they’ll likely be busy for the next three months, because they’re really good. I’ve always gone on personal recommendations.
Don’t assume you can do it all yourself
We have a spirit of enterprise in this country, but the flip side of being an entrepreneurial nation is that we think we can do it all ourselves. Build an IT company with no experience whatsoever, build a house with no experience whatsoever. But you can’t grow a business like that, and you can’t build a house like that.
Taking on a big renovation project, or building a house, is more like growing a business than it is putting up a shelf, because it’s hundreds of thousands of components from maybe 1,000 different suppliers put together by 40 different trades. There’s no way that you, as an individual, could master and control that.
So I just say, get help. If you have a partner or relative helping you, then figure out what their skill set is, what yours is, and they might be complementary. But for goodness sake, just because you once project-managed an IT plan for your business doesn’t mean you can project-manage the building of a house.
There may not be a market overflowing with great builders at the moment because we haven’t been training them for 40 years, but there are still terrific ones out there who are dedicated. Also, most of them want to help – they might recommend a great supplier for you, or someone to do this bit of work or fix that problem. It’s worth tapping into.
Don’t turn up your nose at quantity surveyors and architects
If you cut costs by not getting expert advice, you’ll end up taking much longer, it’ll cost way more money, and it’ll look shit.
You might not think of employing a quantity surveyor (a professional who estimates and manages the costs of a building project) and you might think: “But why would I need that? Surely that’s just a waste of money”. Except that every time I work with a quantity surveyor, I dismiss their figures, and then in the end, they’ve been proved right, which explains why they exist, doesn’t it?
It’s the same with architects; we might think, “Oh, I’ve got a great vision for my home”, but we don’t actually know what we’re doing; we have a vague, cloudy dream-like view. The architects and engineers of this world can actually make it work – and do it better than you can imagine.
Don’t fall for cheap things advertised online
I grew up in the 1960s, and if my dad wanted some tiles for the bathroom, we drove to the only tile shop for 30 miles, and there were four ranges, and that was it – that was your bathroom. Now there’s an infinite quantity, and it’s all available in a global supply chain, and you can buy anything on the internet from anywhere, anytime.
It’s great, but with that you’ve got influencers sponsored to promote something, and the fact that when you type in the phrases “high quality” and “made in Britain”, you may find a brand that sounds British, but they stopped making their own goods 30 years ago and now it’s made in China – and there’s nothing high quality about it.
Recently, I wanted a rug, and it was frustrating trying to find something well-made. I thought the internet would have made it easier to search for beautiful, properly made things, but it’s gone the other way. It’s now about selling crap, and it’s all about branding.
I ended up typing in “Danish rugs” and found a small rug supplier who happened to be high quality, and made the stuff themselves. I respect and want good craftsmanship from smaller makers who do things properly. People think the big mass-produced stuff will be much cheaper than the hand-made individual stuff, but that’s not actually the case. Lots of smaller makers have similar prices – you just have to do the research.
Worry less about trends, and more about how warm your house is
Whether it’s new tech, new heat pumps, or new ways of cooling a building in hot summers – these questions are increasingly important. Style issues and trends, like what style of curtains are fashionable, are becoming secondary to basic, crucial problems of how we look after ourselves, and how on earth we regulate temperature at home.
UK homes are extremely old and low quality compared to other European countries, and we need to work out how to live in these homes as the climate changes. I’m fascinated by new tech looking to address the issue, like a new communicative tool that needs almost no wiring, and it does heating, ventilation, monitors air quality, and can be operated by a four-year-old or an 84-year-old. That sort of stuff is being developed behind the scenes, but it does require some thought when you’re doing renovations. Think about what might suit you and your lifestyle. Do your research, and take your time.
Kevin was speaking ahead of Grand Designs Live 2025 Birmingham, taking place at the NEC from 3-5 October, 2025. It is the UK’s premier home and design exhibition
