If you are thinking about building a custom home and you believe that you will be able to general contract (or over see) the job yourself maybe you should think again.
If you have a job that you work at full time then there is almost no way that you can general the constructing of your custom home yourself. It can be a full time job being the homeowner and having to make all the decisions that you will be asked to make without having to actually deal with the constructing of the building.
An average custom home takes 20 to 30 sub-contractors working on it to make it come to life. That means that you would be dealing with 20 to 30 small to medium sized companies to have your home constructed.
Here is a list of things that you would have to do with these 20 to 30 companies as the acting general contractor of your own home:
• Schedule 20 to 30 companies in an order that doesn’t waste time because time is money.
• Receive 20 to 30 different bills.
• Pay 20 to 30 different bills at anyone time with each company asking for different payments schedules and offering varying lengths of time to pay.
• Quality control of 20 to 30 companies.
• Find all the relevant contractors that you will need well before you need them.
• Find and choose 20 to 30 companies out of the potentially thousands of construction trade companies.
• Answer in a timely manner all of their questions. You must be available all the time during normal business hours. That doesn’t mean available on your cell phone, that means that you have to be physically available to answer questions and show companies where you want things and where you don’t want things.
• Schedule all of their inspections and meet the inspectors for the Municipality and Province.
• Guarantee all of their safety and that their practices of work on your site are safe. If someone was to get hurt on your construction site then you as the homeowner are the first person they will blame and ask to see your health and safety policy and procedures. As the general contractor under new labour laws (even if you are the homeowner) it is your duty to do everything in your power to keep all workers on your site safe at all times.
• Find all the relevant materials that the sub-trades will need.
• Site cleanliness falls on you. Any garbage or debris left behind is your responsibility to have cleaned up and removed before it becomes a problem.
• Order all materials and have it delivered to the site in a timely manner.
• Insure that the individual companies talk to each other onsite so that mistakes aren’t made and things aren’t done twice.
• You have to chase the 30 different companies for warranty if and when you require it.
These are just some of the things that you will have to deal with when you try and general contract the construction of your own custom home. The management fee that a quality and experienced general contractor will charge you usually works out to be less than the mistakes that you make and the time that you are forced to take off work to deal with problems and the scheduling of the trades. This doesn’t even take into consideration the mental and physical toil that the calendar year or more it will take you to have your custom home completed.
Stick to what you are good at and let the professional contractors handle the erecting of your home.
Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.
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