Plan B

More than a few things to blog about, but we'll take it one at a time.

Yesterday (Wed that is), Ann and I met with our second "Plan B" builder. As mentioned, because the original bid from our "build of choice" came in high, we decided to interview a couple builders from what might be considered a level below.

We met with a first one last week.... Tim. He was really nice, was straightforward in both his approach and thoughts and was definately eager to work on the project. He's a smaller operation in that it's just him and a couple carpenters on staff. His work ranged from whole home remodels to multi-room remodels to additions. We asked him our standard set of questions, and with the benefit of five months of design and dicussions with our "builder of choice" (BOC), we were able to dig in deeper than we've been able to compared to our first round of builder interviews. This is probably where we learned the most about Tim.

To this point, we've valued a few different things from a potential builder. We want someone who's going to share our vision in responsible building, looking outside the box and considering innovative solutions (i.e. let's talk this through) and even getting into the building science. OK, maybe that last one's only me, but hey, look who's writting.

Our BOC meets all these criteria. Tim came up short unfortunately. Nice guy and would build what we asked him to, but we figured out that we'd be throwing some new stuff at him (i.e. wall construction & insulation).

Anyway, we kept an open mind...

And next we met Dan yesterday. We're waffled on even interviewing Dan. He's new to the game, having gone off on his own last year and is just new to the business period being a few years younger than us. But, Ryan (our architect) convinced us to at least talk to him. And we did.

I think Dan's pros were probably Tim's cons. Dan's approach was probably in the ballpark of how we'd like to approach the project. But, he didn't do anything to change our mindset on his experience. He's never led a project of our size and in fact hasn't done anything than 1000 sq ft basement. I mean he has worked on bigger projects, just not as the Big Kahuna.... or GC. :)

So, here we sit. Neither are ideal. Both would probably come in at a lower cost. But how accurate would their quotes be? How much extra oversight would we have to ask of Ryan? I think Dan is out. We just can't risk our project on his level of experience. Nice guy and we'd definately consider him on a smaller deal, but not this one.

Tim? Maybe. We talked to BOC today and he just got the revised plans. His words were something along the line of "it's going to be tough" to hit our budget. But, he's trying, which still tells me he's going to come awfully close. But, as the subject of this post suggests, it's about a safety net, or risk mitigation as we like to say work.... makes us sound smart, ya know. I think we'll chat with Ryan tomorrow and we'll see what to do. Part of me just wants a second bid for the heck of it. Just to kind of answer the knawwing question of whether our BOC is really that competitive. Anyway, we'll see.