TalkingProperty: After a mammoth two-year home restoration experience, Hugo Arnold has some advice for those considering their own grand domestic project

Handling builders requires straight-forward talking. The trouble is, this requires straightforward thinking and that just is not where you are when surrounded by chaos, more debt than you have ever thought possible and people who are constantly asking you to make decisions.

I say people, what I really mean are four or more burly builders who are standing around with jack hammers waiting for you to decide if the hole they are about to make is in the correct place or not.

Or bank managers who are falling over themselves to lend you money, but want to know exactly what terms you would like it on. Or architects, who ask more questions than anyone else and whenever you ask their opinion usually preface anything they say with phrases like, "that is a really interesting question" or "it rather depends" or "if we look at your budget".

I used to hate the last one as I didn't have one, it all got used up in the first phase.

I spent two years turning a house that had been in three flats and several bedsits back into one home. My builder came from Wexford and I thought he was fabulous, still do.

At one stage in the project I was expressing some concern over a shower tray and trying to make helpful suggestions about ways we could get round the problem. "Just tell me what you want," he said, "and then I can get on with it."

I was ticked off by my architect fairly early on in the project about not speaking to the builders directly, it all had to go through him. Very quickly I could see why, the lines of communication get blurred too quickly. But you still need to know who you are dealing with.

Before we chose which builder to use I insisted on a tour of four or five pervious projects. The main conclusion was a clear need to pay close attention to finishes, which in some, but by no means all, were not as polished as I was hoping for. This was pretty frightening as you only get to see finishes when the rest of the work has been done.

Item two on my list was to be on site every day. This drove them dotty and, while I have no idea what difference, exactly, it made, but I do know it had a huge influence on making them realise making assumptions was not safe.

Pick something early on that has not been done perfectly, it doesn't really matter what, and insist it is done again. The message goes over loud and clear.

I'm not sure exactly how the psychology of it works really, but there you are consumed by this passion about your home and somehow you have to communicate it, via your architect of course, to the man with the hammer.

It helped that they clearly thought I was mad; lights came out of the walls rather than the ceiling, taps for sinks and baths were located metres from the water outlet and cornicing in some rooms disappeared while in others it was reinstated. Half my job, really, was to try and focus enough on what was supposed to be happening and then see what actually was going on, which was not always what was being said. One day there might be 10 people on site, the next, one. With little rhyme or reason, but I'd be on the phone anyway, trying to find out what was going on.

A weekly meeting is to be advised, jointly with the architect and the builder. You review the previous week and sketch out the current one. Nobody is keen on it, but it helps to keep things on track.

It may sound obvious, but dealing with builders is so much easier if you have spent a lot of time on the project. I had literally poured over the plans for days on end, working out where I wanted electrical sockets, lights located, walls knocked down and in one case, an entire extension.

I'd even gone to the trouble of building a model, which came in useful on more than one occasion in explaining what went where. We had also lived in the house, so as the demolition occurred - there is rather a lot of it at first - and water poured into the basement, I still had a strong sense of how the rooms could be. Would be, I hoped.

One of the best pieces of advice came early on in the project when my architect warned me that the more things we could decide prior to going on site the better. Change is a devil, it leads to all sorts of room for misunderstanding and interpretation which is absolutely not what you want.

We still ran over budget, over time and had to make endless sacrifices along the way. A sense of humour helps along with a degree of understanding tempered with steely resolve. Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was well built.