Three months, demolition to handover

House Braeview is the job we are probably proudest of, and not because of anything you can see in the photographs. It is the calendar.

The brief was to take an existing single storey home in Somerset West down to its foundations and rebuild it as a double storey on them. Demolition to complete finishing and handover took three months. For a house that size, that is quick, and we want to be honest about why, because turnaround is not luck.

Why speed is worth paying attention to

When people compare builders they look at the price and they look at the finishes. Time gets treated as a soft number, and it should not be.

If you are out of your house while it is being built, every extra month is a month of rent somewhere else, on top of the bond you are still paying. Three months out is a very different thing to nine months out, and that difference is real money that never appears on anybody's quote.

What actually makes a build fast

None of this is clever. It is just doing the boring parts properly.

• Decide everything before you start. Tiles, taps, kitchen, colours. Every decision left open becomes a week of waiting later, usually right at the end when you can least afford it.
• Book the trades before you need them. A good electrician is busy. If you only phone him the week you want him, you wait for him. We work with the same people year after year, which means we can put them in a diary months ahead.
• Overlap what can overlap. There is no rule that says the whole house has to reach one stage before any of it moves to the next. Sequencing well is most of the job.
• Have your own teams. When the building work is done by your own people rather than subcontracted out, you are not waiting in someone else's queue.

What we would not do to hit a date

Cut a concrete cure short. Skip an inspection. Push a plasterer to close up work that is not ready. We have seen all three, and every one of them comes back within two years as a crack, a leak or a callback.

Fast is a result of planning. It is not a result of rushing, and if a builder is quoting you a timeline that only works if nothing goes wrong, that is not a timeline.

Thinking about knocking yours down and starting again, or putting a storey on top? Send us what you have got. We will tell you honestly what we think it takes.