Taking Over an Unfinished Renovation

The first move is not a new builder. It is information.

Do not let a new trade start work on the site yet. The moment someone new touches the work, the record of what the last builder did, and did badly, starts to blur, and you cannot recover it once it has been built over.

So make a condition survey first. That is a written, photographed record of exactly what has been built so far. Every room. Every unfinished detail. The half-tiled wall, the wiring left loose, the boiler delivered but never connected. Date the photographs. If the sums are large, pay a surveyor to do it properly: their record carries more weight than yours in a dispute.

Then gather the paperwork in one place. The contract, if you have one. Every text and email with the builder. The full record of what you paid, when, and how. And any sign-offs from Building Control, the council body that checks work meets the safety rules. This is the file that every decision after this depends on.

Two warnings before you act, because both are easy to get wrong.

First, you cannot simply sack the builder and stop paying. It feels like the obvious response, and it is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. Why is covered in the next section.

Second, you cannot sell, throw away, or refuse to return the tools, materials and scaffolding the builder left behind. They still belong to the builder or the hire company. Disposing of them is theft, even though they are sitting in your house. If you want them gone, you have to give formal written notice and follow the proper steps.

Once you have the record, you are really choosing between three routes. Each one can be the right answer. Each one has a trap that catches people who move too fast.

The first route is to carry on with the same firm, on new and tighter terms. If the firm is still solvent and the relationship is not beyond repair, this can be the cheapest path, because nobody has to learn your job from scratch. The trap is agreeing new terms as loose as the old ones, or paying more money up front to restart, which simply repeats the mistake that got you here.

The second route is to bring in a new firm to take over and finish the work. This is what most people picture. How it is priced and run is the whole of the next section, because doing it well is harder than it looks.

The third route is the legal one. This is where the most dangerous traps sit, so it is worth being precise.

You cannot end the contract however you like. If you end it the wrong way, or without a valid reason, you can commit what the law calls a repudiatory breach, which means ending the contract in a way that itself breaks it, and that can leave you as the one who has to pay. In one case, Bellis v Sky House Construction, a homeowner served notice to end the contract a single day too early. That made the homeowner the party who had broken the contract, and they were ordered to pay the builder over £30,000 plus value added tax (VAT). DAC Beachcroft set out the ruling. The error was the timing, nothing else.

Your rights are real, though, even if you never signed anything. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 (CRA), the law that covers work you pay for, puts certain terms into the deal automatically. The work must be done with reasonable care and skill. The price must be reasonable. The time taken must be reasonable. Where the work falls short, you can require the builder to put it right, or you can claim a reduction in the price. The Consumer Rights Act sets out these terms, and Citizens Advice explains how to use them.

Two more facts decide how much the legal route is worth in practice.

There is a fast, contract-based way to settle building disputes called adjudication. For homeowners, it is usually not available. Under the Construction Act, the law that created adjudication, work done on a home the owner lives in is left out, unless your contract specifically allows it or both sides agree to use it. So the quick route that commercial builders rely on is normally closed to you.

And winning is not the same as being paid. The small claims limit is £10,000, so larger claims cost more and take longer to run. Even when you win, a County Court judgment (CCJ) does not make the money appear. If the builder has run out of money, you become an unsecured creditor, which means you are near the back of the queue when a company goes bust, and you may recover little or nothing. The government's own guidance is clear that a judgment does not guarantee payment.

There is one route back to some of the money. If you paid any part of the work by credit card, Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, a law that makes your credit-card company jointly responsible for the work, may let you claim from the card company instead. It applies where the price was over £100 and up to £30,000.

Say you choose the second route, a new firm taking over. This is where knowing how it should be done protects you, because the field does not advertise it.

A firm that takes over a stalled job well does three things at the start, before it quotes a price to finish.

It surveys and records what has actually been built, the same condition survey described earlier, so the starting point is fixed and agreed in writing. It re-costs the remaining work openly, line by line, showing you the real cost of each part rather than handing you a single fresh fixed price. And it draws a clear line, in the new contract, around who is responsible for hidden faults in the old work. A new firm is responsible for its own work. It cannot fairly carry the risk of a latent defect, a hidden fault you could not have seen, that the previous builder built and then covered over. That line has to be written down before the work starts, not argued about after.

Two gaps catch almost everyone, and both cost money.

The first is Building Control sign-off for work that was never inspected. Building Control checks work at set stages as it is built. If the previous builder covered up work without those checks, the council has no record that it was done safely. Putting that right can mean applying for a regularisation certificate, an after-the-fact sign-off from Building Control for work it never inspected. To grant it, the council may require finished work to be opened up again, so an inspector can see what is behind the plaster or under the floor. You can end up paying to expose work you already paid to build.

The second is the warranty gap. A guarantee from the previous builder is usually worthless if that firm has gone bust, because a guarantee is only as good as the company standing behind it. Work that was supposed to be covered for years may now be covered by no one.

Then there is the money, stated plainly. Finishing a stalled job almost always costs more than building the same job correctly from the start. You are paying for the survey, the re-costing, the legal care, the regularisation, and often for opening up and redoing work that was done wrong the first time. Anyone who responds to a half-built job with a quick fresh fixed price is repeating the exact mistake that stalled it; it is worth understanding what a fixed price leaves out. The honest alternative is an open-book cost plan, where the remaining work is priced openly and you can see what you are paying for. If you want a sense of the numbers for your own project, the renovation cost calculator gives an indicative range.

So the failure was never really about one builder leaving. The job failed because no one was holding the contract and the sequence from the start: there was no scope tight enough to price, money was paid ahead of the work it covered, and no independent person valued each stage before it was paid for.

Which tells you what a rescue really is. It is the planning, the contract and the payment discipline that belonged at the beginning, done late instead, on a site that is already half-built and already over budget, and paid for at a premium.

None of this is a problem other firms have and this one does not. The firm writing this sits inside the same maths: thin margins, the same pressure to win on price, the same pull to name a number before the scope is fixed. What can change is where the discipline sits. Myrmex puts that scope, that contract and that payment control at the start, in the pre-construction stage, rather than leaving it to be rebuilt after a job has already stalled.