Cohousing-L Mailing List: Construction Manager

[Sharon Villines (sharonvillines]

>a process to monitor and liaison with the contractor, developer and
>architect et al.

You need a professional. You need a professional. You need a professional.

This cannot be stressed enough. Architects, contractors, city officials,
lawyers, banks, subcontractors, and just plain people passing by will cause
you no end of grief by missing deadlines, not returning messages, paying no
attention to what you tell them, losing papers, giving you misinformation,
charging you for work not done, disappearing, and being just plain dumb.

It is a full time job to keep track of all the details and it takes an
experienced person to know when something is not right. Do not take this on
yourselves. Very few people have the skills or the temperament or the
knowledge it requires to construct a TV stand, much less a whole housing
development.

Remember buying and assembling that last bicycle? Or getting someone to fix
the furnace? Or finding a doctor to tell you the best treatment for
blisters? Take that and multiply by four million. The headaches are endless.

Can you imagine an architect with a reputation for designing environmentally
responsible buildings and working well with clients being six months late
producing working drawings, then not checking them to see that 36 pages are
either missing or mislabelled, and then having designed roofs for solar
panels on which solar panels cannot be put? And beginning the whole process
of working drawings over again. One year later we are still sorting out the
mess. It took a full-time professional with several degrees and years in the
business, working for us, to even sort out the array of problems much less
get the process under control.

In the mean time we have lost several families who had to move on and wasted
tons of money.

Don't even try to do it yourselves unless you have several members of your
group who are experienced developers sitting around doing nothing and
supervising your project is their fondest dream.

--
Sharon Villines, Keeper
The MacGuffin Guide to Detective Fiction
MacGuffinL, Email Discussion List
http://www.macguffin.net