Wow, you had a lot of tender appointments but it's great that you were patient and made sure you got it all right. We have not been offered an electrical appointment.??At this stage we are thinking of going with the basic package. We have a friend who is a sparky who should be able to add anything we want when we finish building. We are assuming this would be more cost effective.
Thanks for your help so far. We are complete novices and have no idea what we are doing!
Having good neighbours will be a great start for you in helping get dispensation through. Another option in your favour is that you are not building in a new estate. New estates are notorious with enforcing front set backs. In established areas, councils are often a little more lax with this.
We only had one tender appointment, but from there any change/upgrade/downgrade we made to our tender meant we received a new tender document. No need for further tender meetings. One is more than enough.
As for electrical appointment, MainVue didn't really offer this to us either. They told us that it was available, and that we could have this appointment after our contract if we wanted, and have any inclusions put into a PCV. We requested an appointment pre-contract signing to ensure all costs were included in the contract.
You could certainly get your friend to do some electrical work for you after hand over. Perhaps have a chat with them about your wants and desires in the house to get a rough idea of costs. If your friend is an actual registered business you could ask MainVue to allow them to do ALL of your electrical work (provided they have all the required paperwork that MainVue need, etc). That would save you a ton of cash. As an example, we are using my Dad to cable our house for theatre, speakers, internet/Ethernet, HDMI, alarm/camera, etc for a fraction of the cost that MainVue quoted us to set the theatre room up with all the required cabling. If you can save a dollar, by all means do it.
No probs with helping. It wasn't that long ago we had no idea (in fact we have no idea about a lot of things still. We're learning everyday). You'll be a relative expert before you know it.
You should start a thread about your journey. We would most definitely follow it.