Purchasing Building Materials For Your Home Building Project - What Could Go Wrong?

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Building or Renovating a House and Procuring Building Materials

If you're building or renovating your home you'll be purchasing all the building materials if you're doing the work yourself. Even if you employ a contractor you may elect to purchase some of the materials and hand them to your contractor to install. This’s often done because if the contractor purchases the material you pay for the material plus the contractor’s profit and mark-up.
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However, there are pitfalls for purchasing the materials which the contractor will incorporate into the building. These include:

• If the materials arrive late it will delay the contractor and result in a delay variation claim from them.
• If the quantity you order is insufficient the contractor will run short of materials, resulting in them standing waiting for the missing items, incurring additional costs and delaying the project which will be for your account.
• If you order too much material this’s a wasted cost. In some cases you may be able to return unused material for a refund but you’ll have to arrange this.
• You may have to offload and store the product until the contractor needs it, unless you’ve previously negotiated that this’s their responsibility, in which case you must timeously warn them of when the material will be delivered.
• If a problem later occurs with the product it’s your responsibility to fix it. The problem may be as a result of poor installation, but you’re going to have to argue the case with the contractor whether it’s the product you supplied or their installation.
• Often, when ordering products like floor and wall tiles and timber, an extra quantity must be ordered to allow for wastage, breakages and off-cuts. You need to find out what the norm is for this and allow for it. However, there’s little incentive for the contractor to take care with the product, or to plan their cutting to minimise waste because they haven’t paid for the material. This could result in materials running out with the consequent costs and delays. It should be noted, that some products such as ceramic tiles and bricks can have colour variations between batches, so you should try and order the full quantity and not part quantities as required. When placing the order it may be possible to request that the material is delivered in batches at a time to suite the construction progress.
• Usually contractors can purchase materials at cheaper rates than you can, or they get preferential discounts from their regular suppliers.
• When purchasing materials on sales or at a discount, make enquiries to understand if the item is on sale because it has a defect or been damaged, or perhaps because it’s the end of the range. Particular care must be taken when purchasing tiles which are the end of the range because if you need more of that product later it may no longer be available. There’s nothing worse than the tiler running out of tiles before the job is complete. There could only be a couple of tiles short, but if there are no tiles that are exactly the same the tiler may end up ripping up all the tiles and replacing them with other available tiles at great cost and inconvenience. The alternative is that you’ll be left with mismatched tiles to fill the gaps.

Image courtesy of radnatt at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

​Unfortunately purchasing materials to save the contractor adding their mark-up to the items doesn’t mean that the contractor won’t add this lost mark-up and profit elsewhere. As a contractor, for each project we executed we had overheads which had to be recouped in our price, and we also had an amount of profit we needed, which was usually based on the amount of effort we had to put into the project. If these overheads and the profit couldn’t be added to the cost of materials because our client elected to purchase them then we had to add them elsewhere – so ultimately the client didn’t always save much by purchasing the materials themselves.
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I'll discuss purchasing materials in more detail in another article.

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