Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: builder contracts

[John Faust (wjfaust]

I'm sure it is true that each contract is unique in many respects. We
haven't even gotten there in our process so I'm guessing here. But I would
suspect that it would be valuable to see examples of what is covered in such
contracts and at what depth. As you abstract away the differences among the
examples, I suspect patterns begin to emerge. That is undoubtedly how
contractors and builders operate efficiently--reuse existing pattern and/or
borrow it from someone else.

Cohousing US could really assist the forming and construction processes by
collecting a library of such documents and then spending some time looking
for the patterns they share. Differences among states are to be expected but
that, in itself, is useful information.

In the mean time, you can try the AIA site that addresses
documents<http://www.aia.org/docs_synopses>.
On a detailed page, there is a description of the A-series
documents<http://www.aia.org/docs_series_a>that are contract forms for
contracts between owner and contractor for many
different circumstances. That page just contains descriptions of the
documents. They want to sell you the document forms for about $10 each. The
synopses are fairly explicit so you shouldn't need to purchase many of the
forms to get a useful one. The forms are MS Word documents but you could use
OpenOffice (or NeoOffice on Mac OS X) just as well. I can't attest to the
quality since I haven't seen or used them. However, they may provide
guidance.

Apologies if I have misunderstood your question.

John Faust

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Larry Miller <larry.miller [at] charter.net>
wrote:

>
> I second Sharon's response. Our contract was more like a book.
>
> On Jul 4, 2008, at 8:52 AM, Francoise Paradis wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have a contract with a builder they would be willing to
> > share for us to review?  We want to make sure we have all the bases
> > covered before we sign one.
>
>
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