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Time and Budget: The Drama of Remodeling
Two major concerns a homeowner has when remodeling are completing the job on time and staying within budget. When you have good planning in the beginning you are more likely to stay on budget and finish the project on time. Bad planning can cause the job to take a lot longer and cause the construction costs to be much higher than expected.
The planning process begins with your architect’s design. Once the architect has finished the design, the drawings go to an engineer for calculations and structural detailing. This is a pivotal time because what you do now as the homeowner can make a big difference in time and money. There are two ways of doing things:
1. You can meet with your engineer after the drawings have been prepared by the architect and before the engineering calculations begin. Questions you can ask are, will the design require any special types of steel moment frames or pre-fabricated shear walls? This normally tends to drive the construction cost up significantly. Another thing to look out for are really large open rooms, curved walls, and large cantilevered framing members. These types of conditions typically require the use for large, deep, and heavy wood or steel beams, which also run construction costs up. This is a good time to change the architectural drawings if you see the construction costs becoming too expensive.
2. Or you can skip meeting with your engineer before the calculations and structural plans are done.
Once the plans have been approved you will get construction estimates which come back high because the structural drawings have too many shear walls and hold-downs, and framing members are too large. The architect then has to reduce open areas with framing above to reduce framing member sizes, provide an extra eighteen inches of wall length to allow for a normal plywood shear wall rather than a pre-fabricated Simpson wall, Hardy wall, or a steel moment frame. In other words, the scope of the work is changed in certain areas, and in some instances it is changed completely. These changes will take more time and you will have to pay the engineer and architect to make the changes.
As you can see there are two very different approaches in the remodeling process. If you meet with your engineer before he starts his work and find out that the architect’s vision is not within your budget when it comes to construction costs, you will only have to pay for the architectural changes. Since the engineer hasn’t done the calculations and structural plans yet, you don’t have to worry about the cost of time and money to change those too.
As a homeowner you need to be involved in the whole remodeling process so you can stay on budget and finish the job as quickly as possible. Meet with your engineer and architect so that the architect’s vision will fit into your budget. If you wait until you get estimates on construction cost that are way beyond your budget you will have to take more time to get the changes you need to keep the building costs within your budget.
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