What Paperwork Should Your Dorset Builder Give You?
Most people ask us about price, timescales, and whether we can start before Christmas. Almost nobody asks what paperwork they'll be holding when we drive off for the last time. Then they come to sell three years later, the buyer's solicitor asks for a completion certificate for the loft conversion, and a straightforward sale turns into a five-week problem.
We've picked up plenty of jobs across Dorset and Hampshire where the building work itself was sound and the paperwork simply didn't exist. Here's what should land in your hands when a job finishes, why each bit matters, and how we handle it.
The certificate your buyer’s solicitor will actually ask for
If your project is notifiable under the Building Regulations, and most are (an extension, a loft conversion, a new structural opening, a bathroom where the drainage moves), it has to be signed off. Two routes do that. Your local authority building control team, whether that’s Dorset Council, BCP or the Building Control Partnership covering much of Hampshire, or a Registered Building Control Approver working privately.
The council route ends with a completion certificate. The private route ends with a final certificate, which gets lodged with the council and does exactly the same job in a conveyancing pack. Either is fine. Having neither is what costs you.
The building control fee itself is set by the authority rather than by us, so we pass it through at cost and show it as its own line on the quote. What we do is book the inspections at the right stages, meet the inspector on site, and chase the certificate at the end instead of leaving that to you six months later.
Electrical work and the 30-day rule
A rewire, a consumer unit change, a new circuit for an EV charger, an electric underfloor heating loop. All of that electrical work falls under Part P. Our electricians are registered on a competent person scheme, which means we self-certify. The scheme notifies your local authority and issues you a Building Regulations Compliance Certificate, and that should reach you within 30 days of the work finishing.
You should also get an Electrical Installation Certificate. People mix the two up constantly. The compliance certificate proves the work was notified to the council. The installation certificate records what was actually fitted, what was tested and the results. Keep both somewhere you’ll find them.
If you’re buying an older place in Poole or Christchurch and want to know what state the existing wiring is in before committing to a full rewire, an EICR is the sensible first move. A three-bed around here comes in at £240 to £300. More often than not it tells you two or three circuits need attention rather than the whole house, which is a far easier number to swallow.
Structural work: get the calculations before anyone orders steel
Taking out a wall, forming a wide opening between a kitchen and a dining room, cutting a new door through a solid wall. Every one of those structural alterations needs a structural engineer’s calculations, and they need to exist before the steel is ordered rather than after.
For a single beam on a straightforward job, calculations run £480 to £720 across Dorset and Hampshire. Multiple openings, or a wall carrying a roof as well as a floor, and it climbs from there.
We get the calcs done before we quote the structural element. Pricing a steel off a photograph is how builders end up either swallowing a £900 difference themselves or coming back to you mid-job with an awkward conversation. We’d rather lose a fortnight to the engineer and hand you a figure that holds.
Guarantees, insurance, and the bit nobody reads
Three separate things get called “the guarantee” and they cover very different ground.
Public liability insurance. Covers damage caused while the work is going on. We carry it, and we send you the certificate before we start rather than when you think to ask.
Our workmanship guarantee. Covers our labour. It’s written on the quote, with a stated period and what it does and doesn’t include, because a verbal “we’ll come back if there’s a problem” is worth nothing once a company changes hands.
Manufacturer warranties. Boilers, underfloor heating manifolds, automated gates, EV chargers. These need registering in your name to be valid, and we do that at handover instead of leaving the paperwork in the box.
What you get from us at handover
The building control completion or final certificate
Building Regulations Compliance Certificate and Electrical Installation Certificate for any electrical work
Gas Safe certificate where gas work was involved
The structural engineer’s calculations, plus the steel fabricator’s details
Manufacturer warranties registered to you
Our workmanship guarantee in writing
Photographs of everything that got buried: drainage runs, cable routes, insulation, membranes
That last one gets overlooked, and it’s the one people thank us for. Once a floor is screeded over, nobody can see where the underfloor heating pipes run. A folder of photos taken the morning before the screed went down has saved more than one of our customers from putting a drill through a pipe while hanging a radiator two years later.
Talk to us about your project
If you’re planning an extension, a rewire, a structural opening or a full renovation anywhere across Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire or London, we’ll survey the property before we quote and tell you upfront which certificates your job needs and what they’ll cost. Book a survey with Complete Builds and we’ll come and look at it properly.
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