This post is the 16th in our ongoing What to Expect from Your Architect series written to provide insight into the process of working with an architect to design and build your home. We are documenting the progress of one of our contemporary residential projects, the Lake Wylie House, so you’ll know what to expect every step of the way. We’ve recently broken ground on this house and are SUPER excited to finally be building it!
Drawings and Specifications for Bidding
It is the architect’s responsibility to provide a set of drawings and specifications for construction which outline *every* (please see comment below for an excellent and well-placed clarification here) detail for the design of your home. Most of the time, prior to a final for construction set, these drawings and specs are put out for bid. “Bidding your project” is simply inviting multiple contractors to provide cost estimates – or bids – for your project. The goal: to find the highest quality work for the most competitive price.
There are pros and cons to putting your project out for bid. Each project and client is unique and one way may be better for one reason or another. For this project we ended up narrowing in on one contractor who we thought would be a great fit for our team and moved forward with them. This is often how we prefer to work with contractors. (We talked a little about bidding and contractors in our previous post, “What To Expect from Your Architect: Selecting a General Contractor.”) For our Lake Wylie project it turns out that the better way to go was to find the right contractor and work with them to get our price to where we needed it to be.
Coordination with the Contractor and Consultants
In many cases, our interaction with the contractor is a collaboration. We hand over drawings and specifications on materials and finishes and then work with them, and their subcontractors and consultants, to make sure our project is exactly what we want it to be and the best it can be. We are open to discussion on details and happy to learn alternative ways of designing/constructing something. For example, our contractor sent us 2 details from his stucco subcontractor for how to detail the joint between the stucco and the under-roof wood soffit. His sketches provided a simplified solution for the design detail we wanted. Great! – Stucco contractor is happy, AND we save money. This is why we like to work closely with all the trades involved in building your home. And this is why we prefer to get the contractor on board early as part of our team. Their input along the way can save time and money.
The Waiting Game
When we are in the Bidding (even if we’re only getting pricing from one contractor) Phase, things always seem to take forever. Especially in the eyes of our clients. The time between signing off on the “for bid” drawings and when we have a cost estimate from the contractor can be 6 – 8 weeks. And by now clients have seen those almost-final drawings and just want to start building!
But, patience during this process is crucial for the success of a project. This is the time when the contractor should be going through every inch of the drawings so that he/she knows your project as well as your architect does. They need to know every detail, every material, every question the subs will have, every problem that could come up and how to solve that now… Your architect should be providing information and answers and working with them to come up with alternate solutions when necessary. “Tightening up” your project during this time will hopefully make way for a very smooth construction process. It’s well worth the wait!
***As I was writing this post I was watching the sun get closer to setting… and the title for my instagram post: “Setup looks good…” seemed extremely relevant to what I was writing… Setup is so important! (I also didn’t think you wanted to look at images of a generic stack of drawings or a bunch of contractors.)
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