While we were looking at houses, we realized that in many cases we were considering some pretty major renovations. Our realtor talked to a builder in the Woodlands and shared what we were talking about doing and what we thought our $/sq ft construction estimate was. That builder confirmed that we seemed to be in the right ballpark.
Of course we didn’t plan on using that builder so pretty quickly after closing, Doug started trying to identify builders to interview. We had decided to use a Design Build firm. Basically these are builders who can do architecture work and do all the plan work to prepare for permit submission. It just seemed like it would be easier than iterating back and forth between an architect and builder.
We did a lot of research online about design/build firms who had worked in our area and spent time going through reviews. Doug did preliminary phone discussions with about five of those and ultimately narrowed it down to three to bring onsite and talk with.
The three meetings were very different:
Firm one didn't really interested in our job. They were quite small and seemed focused on higher end renovations. Despite that, they did provide an estimate very quickly.
Firm two was very interested but their process was very front-end loaded and we would have had to make all decisions very quickly. We didn’t think we really wanted to work that way (we didn’t progress far enough with them to get any type of estimate).
We both agreed almost immediately that we liked the third company. For the meeting, they sent the project manager (Glen) we’d be working with if we selected them. He was the only one who really looked at the existing house in detail. He asked good questions, answered all of our questions thoughtfully, and we both really liked him. We ended up with a quote from them that was of course higher than our original estimates but during our interviews with all the companies, it was clear that building material prices had really driven costs up and so we were not too shocked.
In the end, after a number of additional meetings and a lot of Q&A back and forth, some site visits of completed and work in progress, we selected Averon Construction and signed a contract in late May.