10 min read
Most guides on questions to ask a builder before a renovation read like they were written for a Fulham kitchen extension. They cover the basics, then stop. What you actually need, especially if you are comparing two or three companies across Newcastle, Gateshead, Northumberland or County Durham, is a consistent set of written questions you can put to every firm and score on the same basis before anyone signs anything.
This post gives you that. Fifteen questions, what a good answer looks like, the North East specifics worth adding, and a short section on the numbers to keep in mind going in.
In short
In short: the most important questions to ask a builder for a renovation cover five areas: experience, insurance, pricing detail, project management, and what happens when things go wrong. Get answers in writing before you sign a contract. For any North East renovation, add a 10% contingency to your working budget as a baseline (so £5,000 on a £50,000 job, £10,000 on a £100,000 job), and ask specifically about building control sign-off and experience with older local housing stock. Everything else follows from there.
How this topic is usually presented, and where that misleads you
The standard advice is a short list: check they are insured, get three quotes, use a contract. That is not wrong, it is just incomplete. It tells you what to check but not how to compare what comes back, or what separates a builder who sounds good from one who actually delivers.
The second problem is that most guides assume you are starting from scratch with no information. In practice, North East homeowners are usually at the stage where they have already had a couple of conversations, seen a couple of figures, and are trying to work out which company to trust with their home for the next three to six months. That is a different problem, and it needs a more structured answer.
The goal here is not to help you pick the cheapest quote. It is to help you ask the right questions so you can compare like with like, spot the gaps, and make a decision you feel confident in before work starts.
The full checklist: questions to ask before signing
Use this as a written comparison sheet. Send the same questions to every company. Score the answers consistently. Where a builder cannot or will not answer clearly, that is information too.
Experience and references
| Question | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| Have you completed similar renovation projects to mine? | Recent examples of comparable size and scope, not just general building work. Ask to see photos or visit a finished job. |
| Can I speak to recent clients? | References from the last twelve months are more useful than older testimonials. A builder confident in their work will offer these without hesitation. |
| Do you have experience with the type of property I have? | Particularly relevant in the North East, where a large proportion of housing stock is Victorian and Edwardian terraces, Tyneside flats, and stone-built semis. Older properties carry a higher risk of hidden defects and structural surprises. |
Insurance
| Question | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| Are you insured, and can I see the certificates? | Public liability insurance and employers liability insurance as a minimum. Ask to see the actual certificates, not just a verbal yes. Check the cover level is proportionate to your job value. |
Pricing clarity
| Question | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| What exactly is included in the quote, and what is excluded? | A well-structured quote will list what is in scope, what assumptions have been made, and what is explicitly not included. Vague quotes lead to variation disputes mid-project. |
| Is this a fixed price quote or an estimate? | These are different things. A fixed price gives you cost certainty within the agreed scope. An estimate is a working figure that can move. Know which one you have. |
| Are you VAT registered, and is VAT included in the quoted price? | If a builder is VAT registered and the quote does not include it, your price just went up by 20%. Clarify this upfront. |
| How will variations be priced and approved? | Agree the process before work starts. Changes should be quoted in writing and signed off before the work is done, not billed retrospectively. |
Project management
| Question | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| Who will manage the project day to day? | You want a named person, not a general answer about the company. Ask how often they will be on site and how you will communicate. |
| Which trades are in-house and which are subcontracted? | Subcontracting is normal and not a problem in itself. What matters is who is responsible for coordinating and scheduling those trades, and what happens if one of them lets the project down. |
| What is the programme and likely completion timeline? | Ask for a staged schedule, not just a start and end date. Ask what would cause delays and how those would be communicated to you. |
Payment, contracts and warranties
| Question | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| What payment schedule do you want? | Tie payments to milestones, not to dates or upfront lump sums. A builder asking for more than a modest deposit before work begins is worth questioning. |
| What contract will we use? | A written contract should cover scope, price, schedule, exclusions, payment terms, and what happens if either party wants to stop. If a builder does not use written contracts, walk away. |
| What warranty or defects cover do you provide? | Ask for the warranty in writing. Ask specifically how snagging is handled once the job is finished and how quickly defects will be addressed. |
| How do you handle building control, certificates and sign-off? | On extensions, structural alterations, and most major refurbishments, building control sign-off is a legal requirement, not optional. Clarify who manages this and who holds the certificates. |
| How do you handle disputes? | Agree the escalation route before work starts. A builder who has a clear, calm answer to this question is more trustworthy than one who acts surprised you asked. |
What a good answer actually looks like
Strong answers share a few common features. They are specific rather than general. They are provable rather than claimed. And they do not require you to take anything on trust.
Concretely, a builder worth hiring should be able to provide:
- Recent, relevant project examples with references you can actually call
- Written insurance certificates you can verify
- A detailed quote that lists inclusions, exclusions, and assumptions separately
- A named person who will run the job day to day
- A payment plan tied to progress milestones
- A written warranty and a clear snagging process
If any of those are missing or vague after you have asked directly, that is not a minor gap. It is a signal about how the project will be managed.
North East specifics worth adding to your checklist
General renovation checklists do not account for regional variation. Here are the questions worth adding if you are working with a North East builder.
Local references
Ask specifically for references from projects in the North East, ideally in a similar area or property type to yours. Local examples are more useful than general references because they reflect conditions your builder will actually be working in: access constraints on older streets, weather disruption, the mix of trades available locally, and familiarity with the planning and building control process across Northumberland, Newcastle, Gateshead and County Durham.
Older housing stock experience
A significant proportion of North East housing was built before the First World War. Tyneside flats, stone terraces, Victorian semis, and pre-war bungalows all carry a higher likelihood of hidden defects: original timber floors covering rubble foundations, lime plaster over solid brick walls, knob-and-tube electrical systems, and non-standard room heights and structural openings. Ask your builder how they typically handle discovery of these issues mid-project, and whether their quote includes a structural allowance or whether that would trigger a variation.
Building control and certificates
For any structural work, extensions, electrical rewires, gas work, or changes to means of escape, you will need building control sign-off. Clarify upfront who manages the application, who liaises with the inspector, and who holds the completion certificate at the end. This matters for your records, for any future sale, and for your buildings insurance.
Contingency
The Federation of Master Builders recommends holding back 10% of your total project budget as a contingency for renovation work. On a £50,000 job that is £5,000. On a £100,000 job it is £10,000. In older North East properties where hidden defects are more common, this figure is a sensible minimum rather than a conservative buffer. Factor it into your planning before you start comparing quotes, not after.
What pushes the price up
Renovation costs vary considerably based on specification, but the factors that reliably drive the final figure higher are worth naming clearly so you can account for them when comparing quotes.
- Scope creep and variations. Work that was not in the original quote, added once the job is underway, is almost always more expensive than if it had been included from the start. Agree the scope tightly upfront.
- Hidden defects. Especially in older properties. Once walls, floors, or ceilings come off, surprises are common. A contingency and a clear variation process reduce the pain here.
- Specification changes. Moving from a mid-range finish to a premium finish mid-project adds cost in materials and often in labour time.
- Programme delays. If one trade overruns, the next trade may not be available at short notice. Delays compound. Ask your builder how they manage sequencing risk.
- Unplanned structural work. Opening up an assumed non-structural wall and finding it is load-bearing is expensive to fix properly. Structural engineers, steel calculations, and propping all add cost and time.
Hidden costs no-one tends to quote you for
These are the items that regularly appear on final invoices but are rarely visible in initial quotes. Worth checking each one explicitly.
- Skips and waste disposal. On a whole-house refurbishment, waste removal costs can run to several hundred pounds per skip. Ask whether this is included or excluded.
- Temporary facilities. Scaffolding, site toilets, welfare facilities. These are often listed separately or not at all on an initial quote.
- Survey and structural engineer fees. If the project involves structural alterations, an engineer is likely required. That cost should be accounted for somewhere.
- Building control fees. These are charged by the local authority or an approved inspector and are separate from the builder’s fee. Clarify who pays and whether it is in the quote.
- Provisional sums and PC sums. Watch for these in quotes. A provisional sum is a placeholder for work whose cost is not yet known. A PC (prime cost) sum is a budget for a client-supplied item. Both can move significantly. Ask what assumptions sit behind every one of these in the quote you receive.
- VAT. Already mentioned above, but worth repeating: if it is not clearly shown on the quote, ask directly.
A worked example
To make this concrete: imagine a semi-detached 1930s property in Gateshead. The owners want a rear kitchen extension of around 20 to 25 square metres, plus a full kitchen fit-out and some internal structural alterations to open up the ground floor.
At a mid-range specification, this kind of project in the North East is likely to sit somewhere in the region of £60,000 to £85,000 depending on the exact scope, specification, and what is found once the existing structure is opened up. Add 10% contingency and the working budget to plan around is £66,000 to £93,500.
That is a wide range. The reason it is wide is that there are genuine variables: structural findings, specification choices, ground conditions, and whether the kitchen itself is a mid-market fit-out or a bespoke installation. The point of the questions in this checklist is to narrow that range by getting comparable, detailed quotes that make the same assumptions, so you can compare actual like with like rather than a vague high figure against a suspiciously low one.
How to compare quotes practically
Once you have your answers and your written quotes, use a simple comparison sheet. Put each company across the top. Put the key variables down the side. Fill in the answers from their written responses.
The variables to compare:
- Total quoted price (VAT inclusive)
- Fixed price or estimate
- What is explicitly included
- What is explicitly excluded
- Provisional sums: what and how much
- Payment schedule
- Programme: start date, completion date, key milestones
- Named project manager or site lead
- Warranty period and what it covers
- Who manages building control
- Insurance confirmed in writing
When you line these up side by side, the gaps between quotes become visible. Often the cheapest quote is cheap because it excludes things the others include, or carries provisional sums where the others have fixed figures. That is not always a problem, but you need to know it before you sign.
This comparison process is something we are going into much more detail on in an upcoming post: How to Compare Renovation Quotes Without Getting Burned. That post will walk through how to read a quote line by line, what the warning signs look like, and how to challenge a builder professionally without derailing the relationship. Worth reading once you have your quotes in hand.
A straight conversation when you are ready
Hollinside works on residential renovations and extensions across the North East: Newcastle, Gateshead, Northumberland and County Durham. We take on a small number of projects at a time, which means the person you speak to at the start is the person responsible for delivering the job.
If you are at the stage of comparing companies and want a detailed, written quote that answers every question on the checklist above, we are happy to have that conversation. No pitch, no pressure. Just a clear discussion about what you are trying to do and whether we are the right fit for it.
Last updated: June 2026. All figures given are guidance based on current market conditions in the North East of England and should not be taken as a quote or guarantee of cost. Every project is different and final costs depend on specification, site conditions, and scope.