Like moths to a flame...

(Brendan)

Contractors are an interesting bunch. After all of the reading I did recently on contractors, how to interview them, how to bid out your project, how to draw up a contract, and how to deal with contractors on the job site, I feel much more educated on the way a contractor thinks (and why) and how they approach a project. It's too much to go into in one post, but suffice it to say, unless you have a particularly benevolent contractor, once you sign a contract and construction begins, you and the general contractor are adversaries. Contractors have incentives to cut corners and try to slip a few things past you (if you are not careful) because they can make a higher profit that way. And in many ways it's simply part of the contractor culture to do this, and it's rationalized in a myriad of ways (e.g. "The homeowners have no idea how much extra work I'm doing for them, I'm more than justified in recouping some cost by doing only one coat of paint instead of two"). So assuming your contractor is a really nice guy and would never doing anything like cut a few corners is a naive assumption. There are two options: 1) you can try to find a contractor that, as his references will attest, actually is interested in doing a quality job despite the opportunity for extra profit, and puts his ideals above his profit, 2) and/or you can educate yourself and be proactive and firm so that the contractor understands you are fully prepared to check his work and hold him accountable. We're going with BOTH options 1 and 2, as we hope to inform you in the future (the contractor we are most interested in is bidding our project right now, and we'd probably wait until a contract is signed to introduce him).

So far we've interviewed three potential general contractors; all three very nice men. But one can see from talking to contractors why there is a historical dislike of contractors for architects, and vice versa. Show a contractor an architecturally designed home, and many of them will wonder why it isn't more "normal" and just like everyone else's. For instance, take this pic of the model of our home design:
One contractor , that we weren't particularly impressed with, said, "Why don't you just swing the half of the home on the right over behind the other half so everything's connected?" Weeelllll, that's not the design, and that's not what we would want, and there's reasons why the home is designed the way it is. He went on, "Why is brick running up the wall on the side of home here? Why don't you move the brick over to the other half of the home so it faces the street?" Ummm, I don't think you'd understand. "You're going to have a really different looking home you know." Hmmm, I guess that's part of the point. "You know, sometimes architects do things that really can't be built that way." Got it, understood. Next!

I will say, one of the benefits of talking to contractors at this stage is that they can catch things that really are problems with the design. Like moths to a flame, all three we interviewed pointed to the exact same things when we asked, "So do you see any major issues or causes of concern in the design." Here they are:
It took each contractor roughly 5 seconds to point to both of those areas. The concern: moisture damage and snow accumulation. These are real concerns that require an actual design solution. For the intersection of the two main volumes of the home, the main concern is rain runoff going straight into the side of the brick and down into who knows what cracks and crevices. Fortunately, all of my reading paid off again, as I knew a solution: a gutter that is set into the edge of the roof. Here's a similar looking home, and notice that there are no exposed gutters. That's because they are set into the edge of the roof itself, as I show in the second pic below (see item 1).
This is workable with most contractors, the only unknown is cost. We'd like to do these gutters everywhere (not just the problem area noted above) because they hide what is one of the most unsightly features of the American suburban home: exposed gutters. But it's too early to tell without a cost estimate.

As far as the double-peak garage, this is more of an issue. Not only is there the question of moisture collection between the peaks and drainage, but a bigger issue is snow collecting between the peaks in the winter and the substantial load that would put on the garage roof. That load would have to be estimated in order to determine if extra supports would have to be put in place, or if special truss designs would have to be used. This was a very big issue with two of the contractors, while the third thought it was an issue but was confident it could be resolved by the truss designers he works with regularly, and without too much extra cost. We're looking at a few design changes for drainage though, such as what you see below, where the trough between the two peaks is actually sloped slightly from back to front (click to enlarge).
Ah, the joys of getting into the details. One thing's for sure, much money is saved by getting into the details this far in advance and drawing up a contract with the general contractor that includes a nearly flawless design. Most homeowners charge right into construction without having fully developed the design, and many dreaded "change orders" ensue, with each change order costs lots of money and lots of construction time (especially if work has to be re-done).