Sounds like he is trying (in my opinion quite rightly) to reopen conversations about fees. It sounds like you had an agreement about providing plans and he provided them and you settled his bill. You have gone back and asked for additional services and it sounds like he may have initially made a goodwill gesture and offered some advice for free but you expect him to prepare for this meeting and attend the meeting thereby offering his professional expertise and local insight. With travel time and time spent in discussion with yourselves there is likely several hours work. If he is unable to charge you for this he would be much better allocating his time to other fee paying clients. I say start a dialogue, make sure you have contracted him for what you immediately need him to do and open discussions about where else he might envisage his expertise may be useful to you- it may be that his contacts, or his project management experience or his influence to expedite matters might save you money long term.

@JenP - Yes it was a max budget of 40k...and I have every single budget meeting all around 38-40k; but then at the very end he explained his error which was on every sheet over the six months!!! This error (not carrying over the figure) meant he got the final totals wrong...and its now 50k. @jonathan - OK good to hear about your mum and I agree with everyone and will get legal advice. In my case, it wasn't even that the work hours or materials were higher, it was his calculations on paper - so the individual totals all work listed, but his actual final totals (and what he would advise me when I would have my monthly budget meeting) were continually incorrect - until he realised the mistake at the very end. Lesson Learned: Even when given a printed budget, always recalculate the totals yourself! THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR ADVICE AND TIME - I will update here once I have an outcome. The good news is that I love my apartment and the quality of work is beautiful.

Hi Gus, we are mid side return build currently and had exactly your dilemma last year when we were talking about the work we wanted to do. Ultimately we figured it came down to whether we were willing to pay to avoid the project management & associated stress! So we had a number of ‘design & build’ companies come to visit, talk over and quote for the work, in addition to working out costs of managing the various components separately. After breaking down all the moving parts (architect, structural engineer, party wall surveyor, planning application, builder, plumber, electrician, plasterer, tiler, building control, drainage, tree survey - off the top of my head!) we opted to go with a D&B (project management) company to carry out & coordinate everything for us. Our reasoning included: they have experience, can anticipate things we probably wouldn’t even consider or know about, have access to all the trades, can put a team together which suited our timeline, can coordinate all the trades (and know when to!) at the relevant times, they do it full time (rather than us working at the same time), etc... So in short, it boils down to whether you want to pay for someone to take care of things for you! After we did a number of the elements for our wedding and wishing after the fact we’d just paid to not have to deal with it - we took that on board for this somewhat larger project and went with a D&B company. So far so good.... fingers crossed it remains this way!

Paving for outside - I think grey limestone? They wanted to put the black stuff as shows less marks but it’s a bit harsh so not sure. Getting samples today apparently Just not looking forward to keeping it clean as he messed up and originally told me it was slate (rolls eyes) Just another issue to add to the list! I have to decorate everything myself as the OH wont let me pay for a decorator as I can paint. Boo. It’s just getting the will to do it now, ha ha. Can’t wait for it to be all done though as just want to enjoy it and have some weekends back ;0)