Tradesperson Etiquette: What Builders Wish You Knew

Ask a builder about their favourite clients and you’ll hear the same portrait: decisive, reachable, pays on time, sorted the parking, doesn’t hover. None of it is contractual; all of it is currency. Trades talk, priorities are elastic, and goodwill is the difference between “we’ll squeeze that in Friday” and “that’ll be a variation”. Here are the unwritten rules, written down.

Tea, coffee and the kettle question

You are not obliged to cater. But the self-service kettle, mugs, teabags, coffee, milk in the fridge, “help yourselves” on day one, is the perfect solution: zero effort, permanently remembered. Playing waiter five times a day gets old for everyone; a biscuit tin on a Friday buys more goodwill per pound than almost anything in this series. If you’d rather keep the kitchen off-limits, say so day one and mean it, a cheap kettle in the garage beats resentment in either direction.

Toilets: decide before day one

The single most awkward unspoken topic. Options, in order of common sense: designate a toilet (usually the downstairs one, with a towel you don’t mind losing); on long jobs, a hired portable site toilet (around £50–£65 a week, with emptying extra) if you’d rather keep the house private; the local café as policy is not a policy. Whatever you choose, say it in the first-morning walk-round so nobody has to ask.

Parking: the London tax

An hour circling for parking is an hour off your job, daily. Sort permits, visitor vouchers or a suspended bay before start day, and warn the team about enforcement patterns on your street. In permit zones this is genuinely the highest-leverage act of client admin there is; bay suspensions and trade permits need lead time, so it belongs on your pre-start checklist alongside the contract. Kensington and Chelsea, for example, asks for ten working days’ notice to suspend a resident parking space.¹

Access, keys and alarms

Long jobs run on the builder holding a key, normal, and a vetting-level trust decision you should have made before hiring. If keys make you uncomfortable, your alternative is being reliably present at 8am, every day, including the ones you’d rather not. Share alarm codes that you’ll change after the job, tell them about the cat that bolts, and clear the work areas of anything precious before trades arrive, they’re builders, not removers, and a room full of your possessions slows and risks everything.

While they work

• Don’t hover. Check in at natural moments, morning, lunch, end of day, not every twenty minutes. Watching over shoulders slows work and signals distrust.
• Don’t drip-feed changes mid-task. Collect thoughts and raise them at the walk-round; every casual “while you’re at it” is an unpriced variation.
• Kids and pets clear of work areas, a site is a site even when it’s your landing.
• Radio, smoking, boots, house rules, say what you can live with once, pleasantly, on day one. Builders respect clear rules and resent moving targets.
• Respect their kit. Don’t borrow tools, don’t move the pile that looks like mess but is actually a system.

The etiquette that’s really about money

Prompt payment is etiquette’s serious end: pay agreed stages within days, not weeks, and never use payment as casual leverage over minor niggles, there’s a proper way to hold money when something’s genuinely wrong. Slow payers go to the bottom of every trade’s priority list, and the trades all compare notes.

What you’re owed back

Etiquette runs both ways: reasonable hours kept, the site left safe and broom-tidy each day, materials stored sensibly, your finished rooms protected, problems raised with you early. A team that takes liberties with your house on week one is telling you about week ten, deal with it through the communication habits that keep small frictions from compounding.