What to Settle Before You Break Ground

Whether a custom home lands on budget and on schedule is mostly decided before any work starts. Four things carry the most weight: what the site will accept, how completely the scope is defined, how the contract handles allowances, and who is responsible for coordinating the design team. Everything after that is execution.

Start with the site, not the plan

A plan drawn without the site in hand is a wish. Slope, drainage, soil, trees, utilities, easements and setbacks all decide what is buildable, and they decide it before anyone chooses a kitchen.

Two of our own projects make the point. The Manica Lake House at Lake Lotawana sits on a lot steep and narrow enough that it forced steel reinforcement into the structure and ten months on site; the forty foot walls, the floor-to-ceiling glass and the cantilevered roof all follow from a site that would not accept a conventional footprint. The Faust residence at Lake Winnebago sits on the community’s second tier with no water frontage, so the house was stacked across three levels to earn a view the site does not hand you. In both cases the site set the design problem.

What a realistic budget includes

Construction cost is one line among several, and the lines people forget are the ones that cause trouble later:

• Site work, which varies enormously with slope and access
• Design fees for architecture, structural, and often landscape and interiors
• Permits, reviews, and association fees, which differ by jurisdiction
• Allowances for finishes not yet selected
• A contingency, commonly ten to twenty percent
• Landscape, hardscape and exterior work
• Furnishing, which is frequently left out entirely

Allowances are where budgets drift

An allowance is a placeholder for a decision not yet made. Set low, it makes an early number look attractive and guarantees an overrun later. The useful question to ask about any bid is not what the total is but how much of it is allowance and what those allowances assume.

The way to remove the risk is to make the selections earlier. Decisions made in preconstruction are inexpensive. The same decisions made once framing is up are not.

When should the builder join the project?

Earlier than most people expect. A builder brought in after construction documents are complete can price the drawings and build them. A builder involved during design can tell you what a detail will cost while it is still cheap to change, offer alternates that hold the design intent, and flag the approval path for that specific address.

That is what value engineering is supposed to mean, as opposed to the version that simply removes things. The goal is to protect the design rather than erode it.

How long does a custom home take?

Longer than the construction schedule alone suggests, because design and approvals come first and neither is fully within the builder’s control. The part worth planning around is the review calendar, which is fixed by other people. An association committee that meets twice a month sets the pace for that phase regardless of how ready everyone else is.

Ask any builder for a schedule that shows design, approvals and construction as separate phases with their dependencies. A single number is not a schedule.

Questions worth asking any builder

• How much of this estimate is allowance, and what do those allowances assume?
• Which reviewing bodies have authority over this address, and when do they meet?
• Who coordinates the architect, the engineer and the trades, and how often do we all meet?
• What happens to the schedule and the price when something is discovered after demolition?
• Can I speak to a client whose project went sideways, and not only ones that went smoothly?

When you are ready to talk specifics, get in touch, or read about how we run a project first.