To plan or not to plan? There should be no question.
Custom Home Building in Bend Oregon is what we do. Our philosophy at Sienna Building is to make the custom home building experience enjoyable for our clients. I am sure most builders would say that that is one of their goals as well, but what efforts have they taken to make sure this is the result?
A few months ago we were contacted by a potential building client who came to us with plans they had recently completed asking if we were interested in bidding on their project. We met with them, reviewed their plans and then they stated, “We are hopeful that you will find some ingenious way to build our home for $150.00 per square foot.” Building a home for $150.00 is not a difficult task, but in this case it was a 4,300 square foot home with a tile roof, media room, sauna and so on. I think you know where I am going with this; you shouldn’t design a home and THEN expect some ingenious way to have it fit your budget. Obviously, this unfortunate couple did not do any Pre-Construction Planning.
We explained our Pre-Construction Planning services to the couple and told them that if they were willing pay our nominal fee, they could have a complete line item budget and specifications developed for their home so they would know exactly what it cost to build the home. I also stated that before I was willing to engage with them as a client, they needed to understand that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t expect to build a home for $150.00 per square foot without revising the plan and if they were unwilling to revise the plan, then they will need to increase their budget. Unfortunately they were not willing revise the plan or budget and we parted ways. The last time we spoke they were considering scrapping the whole thing and selling the lot, after they spent over $20,000.00 on the design! Pre-Construction Planning could have saved them a lot of heartache.
Next time: We’ll talk about another couple in a similar situation, and how they may scrap the entire building process as a result of not doing pre-construction planning.