Project Retrospective - threeplex

With our first unit of the threeplex project complete, many inspections passed and our first very successful open house hosted, now is as good a time as can be to do a little project overview.

This post is sort of a follow up to our most highly read post to date, http://rebuildcalgary.blogspot.ca/2015/03/why-does-it-cost-so-much.html where we describe in some detail why it is so costly to build inner city homes in Calgary.  In summary, we put forth an argument that house building costs so much because the authority in our society wants it to be so, due to its self interest.  In addition, the non construction related costs of the project are high, and increasing, and add little value to the end user that inevitably has to pay the higher cost of the project.

Below we will lay our a few categories of the project, and self evaluate ourselves in terms of how we managed the project.

• Design and layout  - Grade B+.  Much of the credit here has to be attributed to our design team which consists of Inertia (Trent) - drafting and permitting, and Denca (Mikaela) - cabinetry design and creative assistance.  Without these two our product would be far inferior.  We can give ourselves a little credit here for issuing the design brief upon which the team was able to generate the plans, and for our careful execution of the construction.  Even getting this project approved by the city was a major blessing, without the design experience and negotiation skills of our team the project could have stalled or been rejected.
• Budgeting - Grade B.  Remarkably we have stayed on budget, and we have invested regularly in budget update and forecast sessions with our accountant to stay on top of changes.  Our vigilance here has paid off and we put more effort into budgeting and forecasting than we did previously.  We have worked tirelessly to remain on budget and this led to some very tough decisions and broken relations when we said goodbye to a bunch of trades we had come to rely on.  Essentially we woke up to the reality of a recession faster than many of our trades did, and some had to be let go.  Our early budget proved to be weak and we got off to a poor start.  We encountered a city requirement that couldn't be overcome without some geotechnical engineering and foundation shoring.  This costly exercise eventually proved futile, but by then we had spent $15k, which represented half of our project contingency fund. We stared down an ugly reality that we had hardly started the project and had burnt half the budget safety net.  To combat this we tirelessly attacked other project elements to seek out savings and economies. To our credit we restored our contingency budget by about the halfway point of the project.
• Supervision - Grade B -.  Unfortunately here we fell into a trap again, where slow framing had a major cascading impact on our schedule.  Losing a month here very nearly cost us the ability to finish the exterior of the building on time and to get the landscaping inspected and approved before winter set in.  Another problem became slow house wrapping and stucco prep that delayed the stucco, caused all kinds of landscaping delays and added a lot of mess and cleanup problems that could have been avoided.  We have suffered from slow framing on multiple occasions now, and it appears we just are not learning our lesson.  Expect major changes here in our approach next time.  On the other hand, the bulk of the schedule has run smoothly.  Many of our trades have pleased us with their performance, including some of the new crews we have brought on.  Our supervisory execution has been harmed in part by circumstance beyond our control.  Due to the change in the economy we have taken on more hands on construction work than we had planned.  In fact we took on too much, and this led to some difficulty in performing the supervisory duties such as advance ordering of material and timely material delivery.  
• Interior decoration - Grade B+.  Based on early reaction to our design and material selection, it appears our design scheme has been very well appreciated by visitors to the site.  Many favourable comments have been received about the quality and appearance of the flooring, cabinetry, and tile.  We really worked hard here to come up with our own signature style.  Full pictures are available here.  https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4SACAcBIaNIWmxYYWctZV9fTmc&usp=sharing
• Time of build - Grade B.  This is similar to the supervision category.  We could have removed a month of construction time from the project had we been able to finish the framing and exterior sooner.  Otherwise the schedule has been followed closely.
• Marketing - Grade B.  We switched to marketing through www.newinfills.ca. It has proved to be a good choice and they have provided better marketing tactics than we have had in the past.  Unfortunately the market is weaker so no presales were possible.  In a stronger market two of the units likely would have sold long ago.
• City inspections - Grade B+.  We had some very challenging details to execute and thus far the inspections have passed without major difficulty.  We hope this continues into the final occupancy inspection.  

    This concludes our project overview post.  Stay tuned for more project news as we complete the other two units and move into the sales phase of the project.