Getting a builder in before the plans are locked

A builder in the room before the plans are finished.

Most people meet their builder after the drawings are done, which is the one point at which his advice is least useful and most expensive to act on.

Design advice is part of how CMD works rather than a service with its own invoice. Cade will look at what you’ve got, whether that’s a finished set of working drawings, a concept from a designer, or a block you bought last month and a rough idea of what you want on it.

The point isn’t to second-guess your designer. It’s that a drawing can be beautiful, compliant and still expensive to build for reasons that are invisible on paper, and those reasons are cheap to fix while it’s still paper.

What Cade actually looks at.

Buildability

Whether the thing on the page can be built the way it’s drawn, and what it takes. Junctions that need three trades in the same place on the same day, details that only work if something else is done first, spans and cantilevers that are quietly driving the structural budget.

What’s driving the cost

On most houses a small number of decisions account for a large share of the price. Excavation and retaining, the roof form, how much of the house is glass, whether the wet areas stack, the length of the service runs. Knowing which of them is doing the damage is what lets you choose where to spend rather than trimming everywhere.

The site itself

Access for a concrete truck and a crane, where a site shed and a stockpile can go, how water moves across the block, which way the house should face, and what the bushfire and coastal exposure of the site are going to demand. Some of that changes the plan and all of it changes the price.

The approval path

Whether the project is heading for a development application or can go through as complying development, and what would have to change for it to be the faster of the two. See the questions page for the plain version.

Alongside your architect or designer.

If you already have a designer, none of this displaces them. It puts a builder’s read next to theirs while there’s still time to use it, and in practice it makes the design better rather than smaller. CMD has built from other people’s drawings for over twenty-four years and is comfortable being the second opinion in the room.

If you don’t have one yet, Cade can tell you what sort of designer the project wants before you commission anything.

If you’ve just bought the block

This is the best moment to make the call and the one people most often skip. Before a single drawing exists, a builder walking the site can tell you what it’s going to cost to get out of the ground, whether the house you have in mind fits the constraints, and what the shire is likely to say about it.

If you haven’t bought it yet

Even better. Ring him before you sign the contract, not after.

What this looks like when it works.

Quoted exactly as it was written. It’s the clearest description we have of the early part of the job, and it came from a client rather than from us.

My husband and I employed CMD Constructions when we decided to convert our double garage into a self-contained living area for my mother. We found Cade to be extremely helpful from our initial meeting, when he helped us with the design and layout, liaison with council, and working within our budget.