Questions people ask before they get in touch

A written document, usually four to eight pages depending on the service: numbered findings, each risk-rated and — where the exposure is financial — given a cost range, followed by a prioritised action list you can send straight to your architect or contractor. The Examples page shows two real formats in full.

Neither. I'm a chartered-route civil engineer who has spent over a decade in preconstruction on major UK construction and infrastructure projects, which is the discipline that asks what a design will cost, how it will be built, and what goes wrong first. That's a different question from the one an architect or a structural engineer answers, and it's deliberately the one I'm answering here.

No, and you should be wary of anyone offering to. This is an independent second opinion. It does not replace design sign-off by a chartered structural engineer or architect, and it is not building control approval. What it does is tell you what to ask them before you pay for either.

Earlier than most people call. The three highest-value moments are: before you offer on a plot, before you fix a price with a contractor, and before you commit to a foundation design. After the concrete is down, a review tells you what happened rather than what to do about it.

Whatever you have. Drawings, quotes, the estate agent's particulars, a planning reference, photographs, a scanned survey. If something important is missing I'll say so rather than guess — an honest gap in the information is itself a finding.

Turnaround is stated against each service on the Services page and runs from two working days to a week. I work on this one day a week, so I'll tell you a date when you enquire and I'll hold to it. If I can't hit the date you need, I'll say so rather than take the work.

Not as standard. Almost everything that matters at the review stage is in the documents, the public record, and the aerial imagery, and keeping it desk-based is what keeps it affordable and fast. If a site visit is genuinely the only way to answer your question, I'll tell you that instead of selling you a review that can't.

Yes. The work is desk-based, so location makes no difference to what I can do or what it costs. Planning designations and highway standards vary by authority, and that variation is part of what gets checked.

Then you get that in writing, and it is worth having. A documented second opinion saying the quotes are complete and the assumptions are sound is a reasonable thing to hold before you commit six figures. It happens less often than people expect, but it happens.

Only if you ask me to. The default is that the findings go to you and you decide what to do with them. Some people want a written document to forward; others want to understand it themselves first and raise the points in their own words. Both work.

No. I take no commission, no referral fee and no work from anyone I might end up reviewing. That independence is the entire value of the service, and it stops being worth anything the moment there's a financial interest behind the advice.

Fixed prices, published on the Services page, agreed before I start. No hourly billing and no variations. If your project turns out to need more than the service covers, I'll tell you before doing the work, not after.

Yes. Your documents are used to produce your review and nothing else. Nothing is published, shared, or used as an example without your explicit written permission — the examples on this site are entirely invented for that reason. The Privacy page sets out how the data is handled.

Say so. A second opinion that can't be argued with isn't worth much. If you have information I didn't — a site condition, a conversation with the authority, a supplier confirmation — tell me and I'll revise the finding. The point is to get you to a good decision, not to be right.