Paying for a builder to be involved in the DESIGN process of your house or multiplex is almost guaranteed to save you money.
The Smarter Way To Cut Costs
I'll explain how hiring the builder at the start reduces various costs, limits headaches, and saves time throughout the project.
Quite a few people - more often those who are developing investment or rental properties - hire architects or designers first and don't commit to a builder until the technical documentation is completed and a building permit is obtained. At this point, design decisions made are based on assumptions and may incorporate some internal inconsistencies that only the contractor / builder would notice. Not hiring the builder saves a small sum but results in far more extra expense for a number of reasons. That expense is money you could spend on a higher quality building, on nicer finishes, or just keep in your pocket.
What A Builder Offers
Buildability
The most experienced architects and designers will generally not be as familiar with how everything goes together in construction as the people actually putting things together. It's an easy enough concept to understand: people who don't have your job won't be as effective, efficient, or proficient in doing your job.
Ultra high-performance projects designed to Passive House or Net Zero may be designed with unusual connection details to reduce heat loss or gain, but the details won't work as intended if they're too awkward or difficult to install well.
A builder will have suggestions on how a particular outcome can be achieved more easily, which translates to less expense. It often also means that the workers doing the installation will do a better job. Higher quality work will last longer and hold up better to wear and tear. Hilly terrain areas such as North Vancouver, West Vancouver, or Maple Ridge may require careful planning of the foundation to accommodate the bedrock.
Sourcing Products
For any part of a building, there is a range of products that you could use. Obviously, some are higher quality than others, and some look nicer. However, some materials of the same quality and similar appearance may be priced very differently. A good builder will know where to find the more economical products.
Often, products with great marketing may have to be shipped from far away or have a long lead time due to their popularity - the length of time between placing the order and the products being shipped. Your builder may know of equivalent products from competitors who can provide the goods more quickly. Products manufactured in the Lower Mainland, for example, won't have the added shipping costs of items from Eastern Canada or customs if shipped from overseas. This is especially important when working on a Passive House project whose components have specific performance criteria.
Even if materials do have a long lead time regardless of what company is supplying them, having the builder on board during the design phase allows him to place an order early enough that the goods will arrive in time to be installed and prevent delays.
Subtrade Familiarity
Typically, builders hired when the construction drawings are complete have to scramble to sort out the different subtrades which will be required and where their respective scopes of work start and stop. This coordination evolves during the construction phase, and decisions made early on don't have the benefit of knowing how all the pieces fit together.
When the builder participates in the design work, he and his staff know their way around the building by the time they begin construction. Through the documentation phase, they're planning how best to sequence the construction activities on site. They will know what materials need to go where.
Subtrade Availability
Subtrades with whom a home builder regularly works will usually have more than one crew, and the staff will have varying levels of experience. When a builder asks his subtrade if they can gear up for a new project, the subtrade's ideal personnel may be deep in another project. The result is either starting with other staff and switching over as the A-team finishes their work, or more junior staff are allocated to work on the new project under the partial guidance of someone more experienced.
Similar to how the builder can plan to have materials delivered to the construction site when the construction progress is ready for the installation of those materials, the builder can proactively contact the subtrades so that they can juggle their workload and staff to have the right people available approximately when the new project begins.
Budget Confidence
When completed drawings are brought to a builder to estimate or determine a budget, the builder's estimating staff does their best to digest the drawings and ascertain everything - materials, labour, construction activities and site coordination. They are also reviewing drawings from other projects, and they often have a fairly short time limit if the owner is asking for multiple bids from different builders. On top of this, the estimators - not having been involved in the thinking behind how the building is put together - can only base the estimate on what is shown in the drawings.
The architectural drawings for single-family homes (and duplexes) generally don't include or coordinate with many uninteresting things such as structural elements, piping, ducts, or other service components. Adjusting the architectural design to incorporate these things as they're encountered during construction is the cause of many expensive change orders. An experienced builder tends to "pad" the cost estimate to accommodate at least some of this uncertainty and reduce the owner's frustration down the road.
However, if a builder has plenty of opportunity to review the design as it evolves and to weigh in along the way, these potential changes diminish to almost nothing. The builder is more confident in the cost when he must provide an estimate, so there's no extra for padding.
I've worked on a great variety of projects over the past two and a half decades with an equally great variety of contractors. Spending more time in the technical and construction phases of a project, I've paid close attention to how the construction drawings are interpreted by the construction team. I've seen how projects that involved the contractor at the beginning or even during the design phase go much more smoothly and avoid most of the typical extra costs and delays.
The start of the design phase in my SAPPHR Strategy™ is the Tuning Workshop - a series of meetings during which the builder, the owner, and I all discuss basic strategies and make fundamental decisions. It's crucial to have the people who will actually be doing the building participate in these decisions. Otherwise, having to make the changes later on becomes very expensive and frustrating.
Imagine the team sits down, has some discussions, makes some decisions, the project gets built for what it was supposed to cost and is completed when it was expected to be finished, and you get to move in. Everybody goes home happy.
Or - business as usual: the architect prepares drawings until the owner feels satisfied, the owner hires a builder, the builder asks a bunch of questions, the architect has to make a lot of changes, the owner pays more than was budgeted and has to make compromises, and the project takes longer than planned. Nobody goes home happy.
There is no silver bullet or magic pill, but my SAPPHR Strategy™ is a framework upon which the architectural design process can be structured to ensure that the right people are involved at the right time, the right information is discovered at the right time, and the right decisions are made the right time.
To learn more about the SAPPHR Strategy™, download a copy of my guide below.
If you would like to discuss the next steps to move your project forward, book a free, 30-minute consultation with me by using the link here:
DISCLAIMER:
The information included in this article is to an extent generic and intended for educational and informational purposes only; it does not constitute legal or professional advice. Thorough efforts are made to ensure the accuracy of the article, but having read this article, you understand and agree that Daniel Clarke Architect disclaims any legal liability for actions that may arise from reliance on the information provided in this article. I am an architect in BC, but readers are recommended to consult with their own architect on their specific situations before making any decisions or exercising judgement base on information in the article.
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