Getting your section ready for the diggers

Eleven weeks on site starts with one good week of preparation. What to clear, what to check, and what to leave alone before the build crew arrives.

A tidy site is a fast site. The builds that finish in nine weeks instead of thirteen are almost always the ones where the groundwork was sorted before the first truck arrived.

Start with access. The crew needs a clear three-metre corridor from the street to the build platform for the digger and delivery trucks. Overhanging branches, old fences and garden beds in that corridor should be dealt with before day one, and it is worth agreeing with your neighbour early if access crosses a shared driveway.

Next, services. Find your water toby, your sewer connection point and your power board, and photograph them. If the new home sits more than twenty metres from any of these, flag it during the quote so the trenching is priced, not discovered.

Leave the big earthworks to us. It is tempting to get a mate with a digger to level the platform, but foundations are engineered to the soil report for your address, and a pre-cut platform that does not match the levels can cost more to fix than it saved.

Finally, think about where the lawn goes while the build is on. Eleven weeks of trucks is genuinely disruptive to grass. Most owners fence a corridor, sacrifice it, and re-sow in the last week. By summer you will not know we were there.