According to a recent survey of 1000 new homeowners across the nation conducted by Adobe (the software company), 63% of the homeowners would rather remodel than go through the home buying process again. However, first time homeowners face unique problems that include limited budgets and lack of experience that can lead to mistakes and unexpected costs. The challenges faced included:
The Adobe study offers a construction budget template which can be useful in helping you plan for a remodel to manage through these issues. However, as a full-service design/build company, Next Stage addresses every one of these challenges for our homeowner clients including budget planning.
Here’s how Next Stage Design addresses these common remodeling challenges:
1. Permitting Issues and inspection and approval delays
As a company with 20 years of experience working in Silicon Valley, Next Stage has established relationships with every major city and Santa Clara County building departments and their inspectors. We understand their unique requirements, have successfully navigated the design review process in several cities, and have been established in the Preferred Designer program with the city of San Jose. We begin the permit submission process before the final detailed design work is completed to ensure permit approval is gained well before construction begins. Our history with these cities and their inspectors gives us extra credibility and trust when working out any possible issues that come up, minimizing delays.
2. Documents
For any project to meet the state’s home improvement contractual mandates, fulfill the requirements of the local building department, and protect you, the homeowner, there are several key documents (plan sets, structural drawings, contracts, selection lists, etc.) that need to be complete and professionally managed. In addition to organizing and submitting these to the necessary entities and reviewing them with you before finalizing your project, we upload copies of these to our cloud-based project management system and so they are available to you online via our homeowner portal for quick and easy reference.
3. Supply Chain Disruption
During the height of the COVID pandemic, supply chain issues were a big challenge to project schedules especially with respect to appliances, windows, and other finish materials for home remodeling. Fortunately, most of these issues have subsided. Next Stage is able to minimize the impact of supply chain issues through our normal practice of ordering long-lead items during the design and development phase, well in advance of the project start. We also maintain a large warehouse to receive and safely and securely store all of our clients’ project materials until they are needed on the job site.
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4. Organization and Contractor Coordination
As a design/build company, with in house designers, developers, and construction project managers, integrated communication and coordination starts from the very beginning of your project when the project team is formed. This ensures that client needs, design goals, budget constraints, and construction challenges are considered and addressed early to avoid issues during the construction phase. We also collaborate with a team of talented construction partners that meet our requirements for quality, pricing, schedule adherence, and overall professionalism. Our project managers and supervisors oversee every aspect of their work on-site to ensure compliance with our expectations and standards.
5. Timeline delays
It’s not surprising that schedule is the biggest concern given the potential complexity involved, the inconsistent reputation of the industry for meeting schedules, and the major inconvenience of a delayed schedule for you as the homeowner. Because of our experience in building various remodeling projects of all sizes and the capabilities mentioned above, we set realistic expectations about schedule and hold ourselves accountable to meet them. From the very beginning, we provide an estimated timeline to you for the design/development and construction phases. While your project is being designed, our construction project managers begin building a detailed construction schedule in our cloud-based project management system. Once the project begins, we communicate the status with you each week and update our project schedule on-line weekly so you can review it and plan for any changes. We also provide schedule estimates for any change orders, either due to existing hidden conditions that must be rectified, or additional work that you’ve requested beyond the original scope. While few projects go exactly according to plan and no contractor can control all the external elements, this level of planning and communication ensures a tight adherence to schedule, and proactive, early warning of any possible delays.
To learn more about our unique fixed-price design build approach, get in touch with our team today. Give us a call at (408) 323-5300 or schedule a conversation with us here.