With the state of the current economy, who would have thought that we would have so much trouble bidding a residential project? When we first started this project in the fall of 2008, the intent was to have this project bid to multiple contractors to let them determine the overall price, because at the time with the housing industry in a slump and with forecasts just projecting things to get worse, we thought we would have a plethora of contractor hungry for work, which in turn would yield us a much lower construction cost.
Boy were we wrong! First we had trouble locating three reputable contractors in the area. Now we don’t know if it was our lack of personal connections in the area since the project is an out of state job for us or just that the project was remote enough to warrant increasing our search radius from the site. However we did find three contractors within an hour of our site. So hurdle one cleared.
In the effort to help control the costs and to verify our estimates, we decided to work with one of the interested contractors in the area to give us preliminary pricing on our addition/renovation of the cottage. The cost came in almost $100,000 over budget. Which had us rushing to make adjustments to our design and construction documents to bring the cost down before releasing the final drawings to all of the contractors for bidding.
Our second hurdle was just keeping three contractors interested in bidding the project. During the bidding phase two of our original three contractors dropped out and were not going to submit bids. What?! Seriously?! So in a scramble we were able to locate another contractor that is actually two states away that was willing to bid the project, and by default won the contract because he was the only one that actually submitted a bid.
Believe it or not, the contractor we worked with to get the preliminary pricing from was sticking to his price, even after we made adjustments to bring the cost down. However it ended up being for the best because this particular contractor works on a time and material basis only. So basically there is no guaranteed maximum price for the owner. The contractors reasoning behind this is that he cannot take the rise of a guaranteed maximum price for our owner. But our owner cannot take the risk of not knowing what his final cost would be.
Consequently the final numbers were still $50,000 over budget. So the past couple of weeks we have been working with the owner and the selected contractor to bring the cost down even more. So now that we have finally got the project in line with the owner’s budget, we are looking forward to the project beginning construction within the next month.
Joshua has a degree in architecture and is a LEED Accredited Professional that has worked in the design and construction industry for over 10 years, focusing his efforts on energy efficiency and building science. He has organized multiple events in Ohio to give young designers the opportunity to learn about “green” home design and produce actual projects. He was also a key player in Ohio’s first LEED for Homes Platinum project. Joshua is also a certified Building Analyst through the Building Performance Institute and performs home energy audits, assisting home owners in reducing their energy usage.
