The Complete Landed Rebuild Guide

Start with the plot, not the house

Almost every rebuild that goes badly went wrong at purchase. A plot has an envelope, setbacks, a height limit and a set of site conditions — drainage reserves, road line reserves, protected trees, ground — that between them decide what can be built on it, and none of those are negotiable once the money has moved.

The useful question at this stage is not what you want the house to look like. It is what the plot will yield, what it will cost to get there, and what the finished asset is likely to be worth. A feasibility study answers all three and is the cheapest insurance in the whole process. If you are buying, have it done before you commit.

Set the whole budget, not just the build

The construction sum is the largest number and the one people quote. It is not the budget. A real budget also carries professional fees, authority charges, demolition, surveys, utility connections, landscaping, loose furniture, somewhere to live while the house is built, financing costs, and a contingency held separately from all of it.

Two things are worth knowing early. Spending on a rebuild is front-loaded relative to what you can see — the house looks nearly finished from the road well before it is halfway through its cost. And the contingency is for genuine unknowns, most of them underground, not for upgrades chosen in month three.

Write the brief down

The most valuable document in the project is the one most often skipped. A written brief covers the rooms you need and how they relate, how you actually live, what you dislike about your current house, what is not negotiable, and the standard of finish you expect.

Ambiguity in the brief becomes cost later. A family still deciding between four bedrooms and five during design will decide it eventually; the only question is whether that happens on paper or on site.

The design phase runs three to six months

We run design in four stages, and each one ends with something you sign off before the next begins.

• Discovery. The site, the brief, the budget and whether the plot supports what you want.
• Concept design. The layout and the mood of the house, with a preliminary budget alongside it. The two arrive together deliberately, because a concept that has not been costed is a wish.
• Schematic design. Revised plans, elevations, sections and 3D visuals of the exterior and the interiors. This is where most clients finally see the house.
• Authority submission. The drawings go to the authorities, and a detailed cost breakdown and a full project schedule are issued. The budget locks here, and the build contract is signed.

Site investigation and a topographical survey belong in this phase, not after it. Ground information that arrives once the structure is designed causes rework.

Approvals: plan for comments

Planning permission comes from URA, then building plan approval from BCA, with PUB, SCDF and other agencies alongside. Comments and resubmission are normal, and a programme that assumes everything is approved first time is optimistic.

The single best defence is a design that respects the guidelines and drawings that are complete when they go in. Our article on planning permission sets the sequence out step by step.

Freeze the design before you build

Before work starts on site, the specification should be resolved down to named products wherever it can be, and the contract should say plainly how payments follow verified progress, how changes are priced and agreed, and what happens if the programme slips.

The point of freezing the design is not rigidity. It is that every change made after this point is made to a building that is already being built, and costs accordingly.

Construction, stage by stage

Construction begins with demolition and site set-up: services disconnected, hoarding up, and a condition survey of the neighbouring properties before anything comes down. Telling the neighbours in writing before work starts costs nothing and prevents a great deal.

Then the house goes up in the order it must.

• Substructure. Piling or foundations, and where there is a basement, earth-retaining structures with monitoring. This is the phase most exposed to ground conditions, and on a tight plot the highest-risk one.
• Superstructure and envelope. Frame, slabs and roof, then windows, doors and waterproofing, with water tests before any tiling goes down.
• Services and fit-out. Wiring, plumbing and air-conditioning, then plastering, carpentry, tiling and painting. The longest stage, and the one most sensitive to indecision.

Through all of it you are kept up to date. Interior design runs alongside the later stages of the structure — furniture layouts, interior visuals, material selections and carpentry — so that the interiors are not a separate project that starts after the shell is finished.

TOP, CSC and handover

The temporary occupation permit lets you live in the house; the certificate of statutory completion follows once any remaining conditions are discharged. Both are issued by BCA after inspection.

Inspect thoroughly, in daylight, and work from a written list. Anything found then is put right before handover. Anything that appears once the house is lived in is covered by the defect liability period, which begins at handover.

Where the programme actually slips

Three places. Authority approvals coming back with queries. Ground conditions found after demolition. And decisions made late — a finish not chosen on time stops a trade, and the trade does not wait; it moves to another site and comes back when it can.

The first two are partly outside anyone's control, but both are visible early if somebody is reading the reporting for the patterns that come before a delay rather than filing it. The third is entirely within yours.

The fourth cause, and the most common in a split contract, is nobody owning the programme. A designer, a builder and a carpenter each holding their own dates is not a programme.