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The best advice I can give to someone building their own office is DON’T start with the beginning in mind — start with the end in mind. Set a timeline and stick to it.
We acted as our own general contractor. I’ve been a licensed contractor for 20 years, but had never done commercial site work or commercial development. I happened to know a good general contractor as well as other consultants. They generally charge from 20%-25% to baby sit the sub-contractors. I started thinking about it and I realized that would be a lot of money on a $750,000 project and decided to do it myself.
Having made that decision, I embarked on the mission to put together a good team that included of a civil engineer, structural engineer, geotechnical consultant and a reliable surveyors. This “technical team” is critical to the success of the project. Selection of your sub-contractors and staying involved with them throughout the whole process ensures that you will get what you have paid for. This is critical whether you hire a general contractor to oversee the whole job or you oversee the whole job yourself.
Being your own general contractor is much like dealing with a claim. The more involved you are in the process and the more you coach your lawyer the better the outcome is. This applies to overseeing a construction project; being on the site everyday gave me the opportunity to make changes and ensure that the project stayed on schedule. About 90 percent of the building’s original design was constructed as planned and the other 10 percent were changes we made.
The 10 percent of the changes we made have added efficiencies to the building that have paid for themselves 10 times over. They were minor changes such as putting voice and data jacks in different places and extra electrical outlets that were not called for by the architect. Understanding the end-use of the building allows you to make changes that, once you move in, you’ll be glad you did. You need to understand the flow of the paperwork, how people will be using the building and visualize how the building will come to life once occupied. Now that we have moved into our new building we can fully appreciate those little changes we made. One major goal was to not have a wire in our office that was longer than it took go from device to outlet, this detail was achieved and truly adds to the aesthetic appeal of our office.
One challenge we did encounter was dirt. Before I started this project dirt was dirt and it was all created the same! Not anymore. Some soil types are very poor to build on which will substantially add to the cost of the project. When “bad dirt” is present, it has to be removed and replaced with select fill material (good dirt). This is always more expensive because you pay someone to dig your dirt out, haul it away and then bring new better dirt in to fill in the hole. This means that you are paying for the dirt three different times. It gets very expensive very fast. This was the biggest and most costly change in the entire project.