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What to do When Your Contractor is Making Mistakes and the Budget is Out of Control
Hiring a contractor for your custom home rebuild can be daunting. You are ready to build the home of your dreams. Maybe you have the design team set up and have begun initial planning. But you hired a contractor that you thought was capable and reasonably priced and...
Why You Should Always Get a Building Permit
My girlfriend is a realtor who works in high end residences and condominiums. She often calls me for a quick assessment of the good and bad aspects of a listing whether it be hers or it is a property that she is about to show a potential buyer. What we often discover...
Tasks of an Owner’s Representative
A construction project has a much better chance of being completed on budget and on time if an Owner’s Representative or Project Manager is brought in early, even when a general contractor has been selected. Early in the process it may appear that everything is fine...
Is a Frefab Home a Good Option? Can it be Custom Enough?
The answers are yes, for many situations, prefab or factory built homes offer real advantages. I will list some below, but first let’s mention a short list of situations where prefab is not a good idea. Where tastes and budget demand a truly custom one of a kind...
Efficient Home Walls: A Good Construction Manager Knows These Rules
If your building or renovating a home in the Bay Area and are installing walls in your home, you might think “can’t be that hard to do right?” You’ve seen it in the movies or on TV, maybe even in real life. You nail in some studs, put up some drywall and you’re done....
Introduction to Series on Building Science
Over the next few weeks I will be publishing a series of articles on practical applications of what has come to be known as “Building Science”. Yes, there is such a term. “They don’t build them like they used to” is quite true, but in a good way, we build much...
How To Create a Smooth, Predictable and Enjoyable Construction Project
I am listing below tasks that I have found are critical for creating a smooth running home construction project. These are all tasks that an experienced Owner’s Representative, (a.k.a., Project Manager) should either initiate or ensure are accomplished during the...
When should you hire an owner’s representative AKA construction project manager
Ideally you would hire me as an integral member as you are starting the formation of your building team. However many of the inquiries I get are when the project is underway and not going well. In both situations, the best time to hire an Owner’s...
If You Want Confidence You Have a Good System in Place When Building a Home
By hiring me as your owner’s rep early on in the process you can be assured of having a great process that will give you peace of mind and save you lots of money during the entire construction process. (And design, if you bring me in early enough.) Here are four...
What can go wrong – Episode Two – Over Budget During Construction
The second phase where budget is exceeded is, of course, during construction. Be sure that this is not always because of a greedy contractor. The cause of overruns can be varied and the source of the problem can come from multiple directions. That is why an Owner’s...
What can go wrong – Episode One – Over Budget from the Get Go
I think we can all agree that the biggest problems that arise in custom home construction are budget overruns. This occurs during two distinct phases in the process: during the planning phase and during construction. Surprisingly, budget overruns happen most...
Are We Over Structuring Today’s Buildings?
Quite often we find ourselves removing an existing structure prior to building a new one, or making substantial improvements to an existing building. Once the above ground structure has been taken down, (hopefully deconstructed not demolished), the old foundation has...
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