Matt Millsap, CEO, on how to handle unforeseen circumstances
“Matt here with BuildCo7. We’re on site in a project in a historic neighborhood here in Nashville, and we just want to talk a little bit about expectation. We are very experienced in the world of historic renovations and remodels.”
“There is something called unforeseen circumstance. In particular, on this house, we ran into that some things you just don’t know until you pull the wall apart or until you do a certain amount of demolition. In this house in particular, we found some insufficient foundation and we found a ton of termite damage. Now, thankfully that termite damage was inactive. However, it was there, resulting in a significant delay. We had to reestimate our addition to account for new foundations, new framing, new peers, and just a ton of stuff that we weren’t anticipating.”
Contingecy Line Items in the Budget
“Now, thankfully, we had a contingency line item in the budget to help capture some of that. So, if you want to walk with me, I’ll kind of talk you through some of that.”
“Now, as this house, we totally reconfigured the kitchen. They wanted a robust island. We got that for them. Framing was sufficient here. We did some new framing on the walls behind us there. Coming through here, this is the existing. The client wanted to keep the old world charm. So, we had these trim profiles that were that we like to keep. As we come in, this is kind of old coming into new. And then we come into our new addition, which essentially is a laundry room and a master suite, master closet as well.”
“Coming back here, this was the scene of the crime. This is where we experienced some significant right along this wall. The termite damage was significant enough for us to do something about and the foundation was was not sufficient. So, we had to do some pretty drastic measures. We brought our engineer in. We acted on it as quickly as we could. But when dealing with these kind of turn of the century 1901 to like maybe 1950s houses often times we find that it just wasn’t enough.”
“We had to modify the framing, modify the budget. Again, we did capture that in our contingency line item, which let me just tell you, if your contractor does not have a contingency in an old house line item on the budget, you need to make sure that’s there.”
“In this case, it was only $10,000. In the larger scheme of things, percentage-wise, not that big a deal. However, that’s 10 grand we had to we had to account for somewhere. We helped our client manage their expectations around selections and the finished product. So, we found that $10,000 in the process early enough that we’re able to capture it later on in the project.”
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