Ready by Completion
Start designing before you own the keys.
Completion day is usually the starting gun. It does not have to be.
The two sequences
What changes is the order, not the amount of work.
- Purchase progresses · nothing designed · client waits
- Completion · keys
- Survey and design
- Detailing and FF&E
- Tender
- Lead times
- Work begins
- Survey and measured drawings
- Concept and scheme design
- Joinery details and FF&E specification
- Tender and contractor appointed
- Long-lead items specified
- Completion · keys
- Work begins
- Purchase progresses · nothing designed · client waits
- Completion · keys
- Survey and design
- Planning
- Tender
- Lead times
- Measured survey
- Feasibility
- Pre-application or full planning
- Completion · keys
- Intrusive survey once the building is yours
The problem
For most people nothing happens until the keys change hands. Only then is the survey booked, the drawings begun, the approvals filed and the long-lead items ordered, each waiting on the one before it. The house sits empty while a sequence runs that could have run earlier.
Once an offer is accepted and access can be arranged, much of that preparation can happen alongside the legal process instead of behind it. Survey, design, planning and procurement are not owned by the purchase; they only feel like they are.
The aim is to reach completion with the design substantially resolved, the necessary approvals secured or progressing, a contractor selected where the programme allows, and long-lead items ready to order.
The building work still takes the time it needs. What can be removed is the long period of preparation that usually begins only after the keys arrive.
The approach depends on access, timely decisions and the purchase completing. Planning and legal timescales remain outside anyone’s control, ours included.
Some of it stays provisional. Without intrusive investigation, parts of the existing structure and the hidden services remain a working assumption rather than a confirmed fact, and the job is to record which is which and revisit them as more becomes known. Before exchange the purchase is not binding, so what you spend is at risk, which is why nothing is ordered at that stage. Can you start design work on a house before you own it? sets out what can move early, what waits, and what is worth risking.
What we need from you
- Early, as soon as the offer is accepted
- An introduction to the agent so access for a survey can be arranged. This is the one genuine dependency, and it needs the vendor's goodwill rather than yours.
- In the first fortnight
- A conversation about how you want to live in the house, and any documents you already hold: searches, existing drawings, a survey.
- Before exchange
- Decisions on the direction, so that the detailed design can run while the solicitors do. Nothing is ordered at this point.
- At exchange
- Authorisation to place deposits on long-lead items, if you want them on site soon after handover. Until then they are specified and priced, not bought.
Start with a feasibility study
An engagement begins with a feasibility study, a short, paid piece of work that tests what the property can become before anything is committed. A few questions first, because the answers decide whether this approach is open to you at all. If it is not, we will say so.