Ten questions, answered at the length they deserve.

Two separate numbers, and it helps to keep them apart. Our fee, and the build cost.

Our fees are a £350 consultation, a full design package from £2,400, or the design package plus 8 to 12 per cent of the build cost if you want us to run the job. Those are set out in full on the services page.

Build costs on the projects on this site have ranged from £16,500 for a whole one bedroom flat to £54,000 for a cafe. A single room refurbishment in an ordinary house is usually £15,000 to £30,000 once you include making good and decoration. A kitchen with structural work is usually £25,000 to £45,000.

If those numbers are a long way from what you had in mind, say so on the first call. It is a much better conversation to have then.

Yes. We work across Shropshire, the Welsh Marches and north Herefordshire as a matter of routine, and further for the right project.

The free first visit covers anywhere within 25 miles of Shrewsbury. Beyond that we still come, and we charge travel at 45p a mile with nothing added on top.

The practical limit is not distance, it is whether Tomas can be on site weekly through the build. Somewhere around ninety minutes each way, that stops being sensible, and we would rather tell you than pretend.

Eight to twelve weeks from the first visit to starting on site, then the build itself. Add to that any consent the building needs.

People are consistently surprised by the first half of that. It is the measured survey, the brief, the layout decisions, the detailed design and specification, and a tender run properly. The process page has the durations against each stage.

Build durations on the projects here have run from three weeks for a dental waiting room worked in two closures to fourteen weeks for a loft conversion.

If a consent is involved, add time. Listed building consent on the farmhouse took just over four months on its own.

For most interior work, no. Planning permission is concerned with the outside of a building and its use, so rearranging rooms, fitting a kitchen or replacing a bathroom is not usually a planning matter.

You are more likely to need building regulations approval, which is a different thing and covers structure, drainage, ventilation, fire safety, insulation and electrical work. Removing a wall, forming a new opening, converting a loft or moving a soil pipe all need it.

Listed buildings are the exception and the rule reverses. In a listed building, internal work very often needs listed building consent, and doing it without is a criminal offence rather than a planning breach. There is a full account in what it is really like to work on a listed building.

Garden rooms, conservation areas and flats each have their own rules. We check all of this at the survey stage and tell you in writing what applies before any money is spent on design.

Yes, and we often do. If you have someone you trust, that is worth a great deal and we are not going to try to replace them.

What we would ask is that they price against our drawings and specification rather than against a conversation, so that everyone is agreeing to the same job. That is the whole argument in choosing a contractor, and what to ask them.

If you do not have a builder, we run a tender to three contractors we know. We take no commission from any of them, ever, and we will tell you which one we would choose and why.

No. Not from suppliers, not from manufacturers, not from contractors.

Where a trade discount exists on something we have specified, it is passed to you in full and shown on the invoice. We do not mark up materials and we do not sell furniture.

This genuinely costs us money. It is also the only arrangement under which our recommendation about what to buy means anything, so it is not up for discussion.

Yes. The £350 consultation exists precisely for that, and a good number of people take it and then do the work themselves.

You can also take the full design package and manage the build yourself. Plenty of clients do, particularly if they have the time and a builder they know. You get the drawings, the specification and the electrical plan, and what you take on is the tender, the programme and the phone calls.

The one combination that does not work is asking us to project manage a design somebody else has done in outline. We have tried it twice and both times we ended up redoing the design at our own cost.

Yes, and about one a year is a whole house. The design fee starts around £8,000 and the programme is considerably longer, usually nine to eighteen months in total.

What we do not do is new build, extension design or anything where the structure is being designed from scratch. That is an architect's job. We work with architects regularly and we will tell you when you need one, which is not a referral arrangement and carries no fee either way.

Two rounds of revisions are built into the design package fee, and in thirteen years we have not had a project where that was not enough.

The reason is stage two rather than anything clever at stage three. The written brief we both sign before any design happens is the thing that prevents this, because it forces the disagreement to happen in words, early, when it costs nothing.

If it genuinely is not working, you can stop after the concept stage and pay only for the work done to that point. That is written into our appointment terms rather than being a gesture.

Anyone who needs it finished inside four months. Eight to twelve weeks of that is gone before anyone arrives with a van, and we will not take a job we cannot do properly.

Anyone who wants a scheme designed and specified without a real budget attached. We can work to almost any number, including a small one, but not to an undecided one.

Anyone who wants the whole thing run remotely from photographs. It is a real service and other people do it well. It is not what we are.

And anyone who mainly wants a room that photographs well. That is a legitimate thing to want, and there are studios who are very good at it. We spend most of our time on how a room is used at eight on a wet Tuesday morning, which is a different brief.