Jeff Eriks owns Cambridge Construction and Cambridge Architects in NWI.  With twenty years of experience and the ability to design and build, leading to relevant design and construction practices has allowed Cambridge to become a leading NWI general contractor. After meeting Jeff I spent some time on his sites and found his take on the design side of a building process. Any one talking to an architect in NWI should read his take before making any choices.

So we have run into a few cases lately where we have bid against people for architectural design projects and have not won the bid.  We are told after the fact when we presented a breakdown of our proposal that we included more time to prepare the drawings then the other firms which is why we didn’t win the bid.

So you can look at this two different ways – one way is that maybe we included too many hours and the other way is that we included the right amount in order to provide drawings that are complete so that when the project goes out to bid the owner is left with solid bids from the general contractors in order to minimize change orders.

I will provide one example of why I think we were right with our price – we included approximately 400 hours of CAD drafting and 240 hours of Architects time and the competitor that won the proposal included 300 hours of CAD drafting and 40 hours of Architects time.  Now, I don’t know about you, but if I were building a building I would want the architect more involved in my design, detailing, specifications and meetings than just 40 hours.  We are talking about a $90,000 design project and $1,000,000+ construction project.  They beat our price roughly 10%.  We have bid on 2 other projects by this architectural firm and during the bid process there were over 100 questions raised regarding to clarifications, discrepencies and errors within the drawing set.  The project that we drew had 6 questions raised during the bid process.  And since the projects are just now being built, I don’t have an answer yet as to how many change orders will take place, but I can guarantee it will be more than the $9,000 it would have cost to hire us to prepare the construction documents.

The whole point of this post is for you to realize that with architectural drawings, the better your details, clarifications and drawings up front the smaller your risk down the line.  You want to limit your risk and exposure during the bid process so that you can have a good feeling moving forward that the price you get from your general contractorswill be the final price for construction and that you won’t get hit with $1,000’s of dollars worth of change orders because you wanted to save a couple thousand up front.

IN-Cambridge Architects is a Northwest Indiana Architectural firm specializing in medical facilities, office buildings, restaurants and other commercial construction projects.  Click here to see our portfolio of Northwest Indiana Architectural Projects as well as solid waste projects nationwide such as transfer stations andhauling companies.

Just remember, The bitterness of poor quality last long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten!