Where A Custom Home Gets Built Before It Gets Built
How much actually happens before a crew shows up on your lot?
And what are you paying for during a phase when nothing physical is being built?
In this post, you’ll learn when we get involved with your architect, how we read a set of drawings for what’s missing, what a Berkeley Hills slope adds to the engineering, and how all of it turns into a fixed price and a schedule you can plan around.
What Happens During The Design And Pre-Construction Phase Of A Custom Home?
During the design and pre-construction phase of a custom home, the builder joins the architect to review drawings for gaps and buildability, coordinates the geotechnical and structural engineers, prices the site work, locks material selections, dates every long-lead order against the schedule, and collects hard bids on each line item.
What comes out is a buildable plan and a fixed price before construction starts.
How We Get Involved Before The Drawings Are Finished
At Vought Construction, we get involved while your architect is still developing the plans, not after they’re stamped.
The reason is money.
Architects are good at design and mostly not good at guessing construction costs, so a number from that stage tends to come in way off.
Then we show up with a real one, and we look like the bad guy.
Worse, you’ve already paid for a permit set for a house you can’t afford, and now you’re back at the beginning, which is one of the more expensive custom home planning mistakes you can make.
So we ask the architects we refer to let us handle the pricing, or at least call us before they sit down with you.
On a first call, we’ll tell you we’re typically around a thousand dollars a square foot.
That number is not a bid.
It’s a filter, so nobody spends six months designing something that was never going to work.
We also care which architect you hire, and we’d rather refer one, because who ends up on the drawings shapes most of what working with architects on a custom home turns into.
The architect on our Mill Valley job is one of those.
The ones we work with know a bathtub can run ten grand.
When our price lands, they tell you it makes sense instead of telling you it’s a lot.
How We Read Your Architect’s Drawings For What’s Missing
We read the drawings, looking for gaps, because a set of plans is never 100% fleshed out.
That’s not a knock on your architect.
Plans and details get drawn well and still leave decisions unmade, and somebody has to find those before they turn into a stalled crew.
Two of our people came out of architecture, and whether a builder can actually read a drawing set is worth asking about when you’re choosing a custom home builder.
Jorge handles estimating and architectural oversight, and Jairo spent years managing projects at a large architectural firm before he came over to the construction side.
They can pick apart a drawing set and ask your architect the right question at the right time.
Timing is the whole thing here.
Catching a missing detail the week the work is due gets you a scramble.
Catching it two months out gets you a plan.
What we don’t do is redesign anything.
We stay in our lane.
Your architect has already sold you on this house, and contradicting their drawings in front of you helps nobody, so real architect and builder collaboration means we take it up with them instead.
Where we push is the nuts and bolts, because a drawing can be beautiful and still not say how it gets built.
What A Hillside Site Adds To Design And Pre-Construction
A hillside adds a whole engineering layer to the front of the job, and on an upslope lot, it adds the most, because the excavation gets big.
The city gets involved early, too, since it wants to know how much dirt is coming out before it approves anything.
Collapse is the reason.
Everyone on the permit is trying to make sure the cut doesn’t take a neighbor’s house down with it.
What The Geotechnical Report Decides
The geotechnical engineer goes out first and pulls boring samples to see how competent the soil is.
Your structural engineer designs the foundation based on that report, which is what narrows down which hillside foundation materials are even on the table for your lot.
Then we work the other direction: if the wall has to sit at a given elevation, we have to figure out how deep to cut and how much dirt that actually is.
Setbacks are usually five feet, so there’s about ten feet between your house and the one next door.
But you over-excavate past the wall line, so the neighbor’s foundation can end up seven feet from an open cut.
Some of these cuts run twenty feet deep.
That’s when we plan shoring.
Shotcrete, or drilled temporary piers, will hold the hill back while we work.
Sometimes we find an underground creek running through the hill, which is a lot cheaper to find now than in month three.
There are people’s lives on the line during an excavation like that.
We’ve never had a collapse.
Getting Machines In And Dirt Out
Access sets the excavation price before anything else does.
If we can get a sixty to seventy thousand pound machine up there with a fifty-foot reach, we move dirt fast.
If we can’t, a crew walks it up the hill on planks so we don’t tear up the asphalt, and that burns a day.
The machine bills around three hundred dollars an hour either way.
The rig that delivers it is about sixty feet from the nose of the semi to the end of the trailer, and Oakland and Berkeley Hills streets were laid out in the 1900s.
Then the dirt has to leave.
We’ll run ten or twelve dump trucks at once and pull fifty loads in a day, which needs staging room down the hill and a day that isn’t trash day.
We walk through all of this with the excavation contractor during pre-construction.
Guessing does not work.
How Pre-Construction Turns Those Drawings Into A Fixed Price And A Schedule
Pre-construction turns the drawings into a price by bidding them out line by line, and into a schedule by working backward from the finish date.
You sign a Professional Services Agreement first, for three to ten thousand dollars, and that buys the work.
Finalizing a bid can take six months.
Hard bids from every subcontractor and every vendor, on every line item, against selections you’ve actually made.
If the number comes back higher than you want, this is where we offer structural alternatives instead of cheapening the design.
The schedule side starts with the Gantt chart, and we build it from the bottom up.
Out of that comes a spreadsheet we call decision, action, deadline.
Cabinets ordered by this date, tile by this one, plumbing fixtures on site by that one, and flooring six months out.
That document exists because lead times are what actually stall custom homes.
We asked around about a job near us that had been sitting, and the answer was that nobody ordered the windows on time, and by then, a window is three months out, and the whole site goes quiet.
Windows, doors, tile, appliances.
We finalize those orders during pre-construction and hold the money until the construction contract is signed.
Once all of it is settled, you get a fixed price with the exclusions named, and a schedule we hold to within about five to ten percent.
Start On Paper, Finish On Schedule With Vought Construction
The short version: the months before anyone breaks ground are where your drawings get checked for what they left out, your site gets priced for real, and every order gets a date attached to it.
Get that part right, and the build is mostly execution. If you’re early in the process of building a custom home and want to talk it through, fill out our contact form or give us a call today.
