Building Process
Introductory Meeting
We invite you to bring your plans, your ideas, and your thoughts to the introductory meeting, especially about the square footage, style, function, and finishes that would make you happy. We need to know as much detail as possible to be able to advise or quote you correctly and accurately.
Preliminary Floor Plans
After we get to know each other and we have a good grasp on your needs, your budget, and your expectations, we can move on to Preliminary Drawings.
We engage a professional design and drafting service to work directly with our clients in the design process. There is a cost to this service, and we take a $2500 deposit to cover the cost. This deposit is credited in full to the Building Contract when we agree on a design and a Contract. If we cannot agree and no Contract is written, then we will refund the deposit less the billed cost of the Design Consultant on an hourly rate, which they will disclose up front.
Floor Plans will express the functionality of a design, as well as identify any important issues that are often overlooked, such as traffic flow, accommodating the mechanical and other important but hidden design requirements, and most importantly the scaled drawings can be estimated accurately by trades and suppliers.
Normally we will go back and forth with clients for a few weeks, adjusting the floor plans and the budget as we go, until we have a plan that we can all agree on and a budget we can all work with.
At this point we will formalize a building agreement and move ahead to working drawings.
Building Contract
By the time we are ready to formalize a Contract together, we will be comfortable working as a team. This teamwork process will continue, and while the Design Professional is working with you on things like your exterior finishes, kitchen details, and the like, they will also be drawing the mechanical, electrical, and structural plans, and collaborating with our Engineers to have everything ready for permit approvals.
When the final drawings are Engineer Stamped, ready for permit, you will be meeting with a new team member. Our design consultant will work with you as you visit the showrooms of our flooring suppliers, our cabinetry specialists, stone and ceramic showrooms, and lighting and plumbing fixture suppliers. Our consultant will make this process understandable and help you in your decision making, while at the same time ensuring that your themes and preferences are honoured. This is YOUR home after all, and we want the final product to reflect YOUR taste and values.
In the background, our team will be collecting your decisions and communicating with our suppliers and trades, and if there are any impacts on the Budget allowances, either credits or extras, our team will keep you informed and correctly document the process so that trades and suppliers show up at the right time with the right product for your project.
The Building Process
From the time we dig the foundation to the day we hand over the keys to a new home, we continue to work collaboratively with you, and you are part of the team in every respect.
Modern safety protocols must be followed, by provincial legislation, so if we sound like we aren’t inviting you to visit the site on your own, please understand the serious consequences, for us and for you, of ignoring the regulations. Our team will be happy to visit the site with you during working hours and by appointment, and in fact I want you to be on site helping everyone track the progress and identify any potential issues. We just want you to be safe, and we want our trades to be safe too. By regulation, if you were to visit the site on your own, any trade working on the site has to pack up their tools and leave the site. So you can understand why we want you to work with us on this item, to keep things moving along safely and correctly.
Having said all that, there is much you will be asked to do, in terms of helping us keep the project on track. We need your input and your decisions on many specific selections, and we need you to work with us to keep the workflow moving ahead. Once the project comes out of the ground, we want to meet with you on-site at many critical phases, to inspect the work with us and to verify that what is being installed is what you expected. We work with you, all the way.
Transparency
You will hear us speak often of Budgets. That is because, before we will sign a Building Agreement with you, we will have circulated the plans and built a Budget that covers all the known costs to build the Project. This is an internal document that all Builders base their business models on, but we go one step beyond. We disclose the major components of the Budget as part of our Building Agreement. We want you to know the actual cost of the largest items involved, so that when we work together with you as a team, you are fully informed from the outset.
Changes
During any build process, changes happen. Sometimes they are happy changes, like an upgrade to the cabinetry or flooring that you select. This is a change that you initiate, and because we fully disclose our principal items in our Budget, we are able to show you the impact, dollar-for-dollar, of your upgrade. We allow you to upgrade at Cost, there is no admin fee or builder’s markup.
Sometimes the changes are unhappy ones. Something like an unexpected extra cost due to supply chain issues or other impacts that are beyond the control of the Builder. Again, because we fully disclose the starting Budget, we can work together collaboratively to mitigate these situations. A simple example would be when a window supplier goes out of business and we have to place the order with another supplier at a higher price. Together, we can discuss the impact, and if the additional cost cannot be easily handled, we can look together for other ways to reduce cost, perhaps cancelling an upgrade for now, or deciding to defer an item like a deck until a later date. We can often find ways to reduce the impacts of such unhappy changes. We work as a team.
Warranty
We register your home with a New Home Warranty provider under the Provincial legislation. Beyond that, we continue working with you in a collaborative manner to ensure that the home you designed is the home you now enjoy. When we are ready to hand over the keys, we will walk through the home and make a list of any deficiencies. Our commitment to you is to reduce the list to near zero within one month of occupancy. Of course, this may be impacted by weather or product availability, but you get the idea.
Around nine months after you move in, we will initiate a second inspection and a second (hopefully shorter) list. This normally involves items like drywall nail pops due to shrinkage and settling, or hardware adjustments and the like. Our goal would be to reduce this list to near zero by your one year anniversary in the home.
Our door is always open, though, and even though after one year the regular Builders Warranty is usually only structural items, we won’t turn you away when you need help. We realize the value of a client and we want to be there for you, when we can.