HELP!
I am completely spent. I am in the fourth year of a renovation on a two-family house. I need help but I have serious trust issues based not only on personal experiences I’ve had with folks in my place but on the quality of the work I see being done on other buildings in my…
I am completely spent. I am in the fourth year of a renovation on a two-family house. I need help but I have serious trust issues based not only on personal experiences I’ve had with folks in my place but on the quality of the work I see being done on other buildings in my area. My boyfriend and I have been chipping away at it, and in the last year have found one trustworthy helper. He, of course, is spread thin and is only able to come over once or twice a week.
When I purchased the place, the income from the rental was factored into my ability to pay the mortgage. They claimed the unit was livable but I later found out from the neighbor that the women who lived upstairs just didn’t go near the downstairs because the plumbing was shot (crack in the soil stack, among other things, I was later to discover). Were things cleaned up and the inspector paid off? I have no clue. I just know that the unit could net me about $1500 a month and it pains me to think, not only of the lost income, but of the years this has taken off my life. Every spare moment is spent on the house. I just don’t have it in me anymore.
Does anybody out there have a work ethic, a conscience, and a soul? This experience has almost completely destroyed my faith in humanity. I know I might have lost several potential responders based on the last two comments but that is how I feel.
I am not cheap. I will pay for people who know what the they’re doing. I just don’t want to have to stay home from work everyday to make sure they don’t leave early or do shit quality work. I don’t care whether you are licensed or not because as everyone here knows that is definitely not an indication of your abilities. I know there are people out there who understandably don’t want to recommend somebody good until they’re done with them so they don’t have to share. So, is anyone finished with their reno, happy with the quality of the work and willing to share the email or phone number of the godsend who helped them complete it? I am really a sane person. I am just absolutely shattered. I am willing to pay at the end of each day for the work completed. There is a little bit of everything that needs doing. I have an electrician but there are things needing completion before he can finish his job. I need guidance as well expertise. Please help me. Thank you.
A renovation support group would be great and I’m not even joking.
Hire Anais Rogers : 646-460-0100. She is a great construction manager/general contractor who also does design/interior decorating. She has good people to bring on jobs and really helps you think through details. She managed our reno while we were away and did a great job.
“An architect will not manage any project of this scale with any worthwhile oversight. It is also bad judgment to use the same architect who produced the construction documents, to manage the work. There is an inherrent conflict of interest in doing this. If there was anything he missed while producing the specs/construction documents, he will never claim ownership of the mistake. It can cause problems with the “ugly” contractor most all here have problems with.”
I’m going to disagree with you, Bill. The idea that you have, where some fictional watertight drawing set is then interpreted by a contractor with guidance and oversight of a construction manager is in reality an expensive headache of meetings, differences of opinion and egos, with the most important thing — the owner’s design intent — potentially getting lost in the shuffle.
I oversee all of the jobs I draw precisely because I know I cannot foresee every eventuality, I cannot guarantee every measurement exact, and I cannot write specs for a moving target like an evolving renovation. But what I can do is guard design intent: much, much better than a project manager can. Why? Because I was at all the design meetings and understand the clients’ desires. A construction manager wasn’t there .
In the best of worlds, with a big budget, I would welcome the help of a good construction manager on my jobs, as it would extend my reach and aid my efficiency. But the potential downside is large: a CM telling an architect what his drawing set contains or doesn’t isn’t the kind of scenario a lot of architects are not going to want to sign up for. There’s ALWAYS a mistake and something is ALWAYS missing — why pay someone to tell you that?
I’m also wondering what kind of architect would sign up for drawings only, but be on the hook for someone else’s opinion about what is or is not missing. How do I price something that is as much personality driven as anything else? Simple: I don’t.
To be sure there is confusion regarding just what architectural oversight on a job is. Architects are, by contract and by judicial decision, restricted in oversight on jobs: they control how the job turns out (design intent), but cannot tell contractors how to do or schedule their jobs. When an architect starts telling contractors how to do their work, he or she assumes liability for the whole job, liability that professional insurers won’t cover.
A construction manager can and often does enforce on a jobsite a standard of good workmanship, and can influence subs (architects do not have contractual relationships with subs). But the idea that this same person can also advise what is the scope of work (which is a function of the drawing set, specifications and contract generated by the architect) is silly: that’s what the architect does. The contract documents clients sign with architects allow for architects to adjuicate differences of opinion regarding what is or is not included (BTW: typically, the rule is, if it’s in the drawings, the contractor bought it). Adding an extra layer of adjudication here is a) unsupported by the contract language typically used, b) expensive and c) potentially too many chefs in the kitchen, d) opens the job to the possiblity of litigation, as a smart contractor would play the architect off of the CM or vice versa.
It’s true there are contracts that can be written to include a construction manager: one version has the architect hiring he or she, in another version the construction manager is the client’s rep. It is possible, but more typically for large-scale projects, and in my opinion unnecessarily complicated in small-scale renovation.
Bill, just go get your license. Then you can CM all you like, for real.
–an architect in Brooklyn
“…they dont know construction in its dirty details”
Man I couldn’t have said that better myself. I have a degree in architecture. I have worked in the field for many years in many different capacities, and I have come across very few who know one end of a hammer from another. Like doctors, I feel architects should get practical field experience so they understand just what that line they drew (or the one they forgot to draw) means in real terms in the field.
Bill G.
Hire a project Manager, Construction Manager, etc. Architect for drawings only — as someone pointed out, there’s a conflict of interest, and besides, they dont know construction in its dirty details (although many have great insights on specific situations).
An architect will not manage any project of this scale with any worthwhile oversight. It is also bad judgment to use the same architect who produced the construction documents, to manage the work. There is an inherrent conflict of interest in doing this. If there was anything he missed while producing the specs/construction documents, he will never claim ownership of the mistake. It can cause problems with the “ugly” contractor most all here have problems with.
An independant construction manager should be engaged to do this so he can then advise you of whom might be responsible for any oversight/extra work or unforseen condition that was either not accounted for or missed by the contractor eager to get the work with a low bid. I am considering offering my services for hire as a construction mamager for these smaller scale projects, once I complete my conversion and have a place to live in Brooklyn.
Proper vetting of the subs is paramount and the only way to a relatively trouble-free job. Hey it’s construction, not brain surgery. There are unforseen conditions in rehab/renovation. The methodes of construction 100 years ago fostered unusual construction details and conditions. Sometime we open a can of worms and don’t like it, but that is always a risk when working on old buildings.
I hate shoddy work. There are a lot of hacks out there passing themselves off as experts. I guess there are a lot of people here who are unfortunately finding this out the hard way. I feel for you.
Bill G.
I am with you! We have a lot of skills, so I figured we’d be the GC… but we can’t find anyone skilled enough to keep from firing. So instead of turning out this nice renovation in notime, my husband and I are doing just about all the labor ourselves.
On one hand, yes. When we think about the money we are not getting in rent month after month, we blanch.
But then we think about the money we are saving not paying these foolish, foolish people, and it winds up being OK.
The only problem comes when there’s something we totally know nothing of. We are in love MasterPlvmber–he’s done us right. But does anyone know a competent mason?
Come to find we are missing part of the back of our garden apartment…
There are many an architect who have also gone MIA- have you not been reading the forum folks?
OP, I am so sorry about what happened to you, we decided to learn EVERYTHING ourselves after getting screwed out of many tens of thousands. We also own a gut-needin’ renovation 2 fam. We took a class at Neighborhood Housing Services (home repair class) in Bedford Stuyvesant ($125 for 10 classes), and learned a tremendous amount. We can now do everything out of the walls- we installed our own beautiful kitchen and bathroom, from scratch! Also, we can see if the work being done in the walls (that have been demoed) is crap or not most of the time.
This being said, we love the guys that we have now, who do the in-the-wall stuff, and would trust them with out-of-the-wall stuff as well:
Ricardo (plumber)-516.557.1686
William (carpenter)- 917.676.8798
Steve (electric)- 917.282.6566
Warren (GC)- (917) 912-2097
Good luck! And hang in there 🙂
you tried to save a few bucks by not hiring an architect but now you are complaining that it was not as easy as it looked? you can’t have it both ways