Consulting a budget during a construction project should not be left to the final hours. It is important to mitigate any risk of blowing your budget by developing safe processes during the conception of the project that will last until the construction stage. To ensure a successful outcome of your construction project, you must always budget first and make sure you set a realistic budget in the beginning.
Project owners have to make sure that the time and money that is being spent on the project, or dream home, is structured. Your budget must be considered throughout the preliminary phases and the design managed, so the two stay aligned.
The design phase alone can take up a large portion of your budget, only to leave you disappointed when you realise your project is over budget. It can be an extremely wasteful affair requiring you to re-design, get further approvals from the council and engineers, and time and money wasted that could be better spent during the construction stage.
Endeavour to consult your budget early on, making changes to your design to suit your budget before you submit for approvals. There are generally four stages in the design process that will ensure you arrive safely to the finish line. These include:
1. Programming and Feasibility This is the analysis of the budget relative to your requirements. It determines how feasible the project is in terms of design, cost, process (scheduling) and operation.
2. Schematic Design This phase produces rough drawings of a site plan and floor plans and is often illustrative sketches of the full vision. Allowing for a full revision of the project before any major decisions are made. This process explores all options available to achieve brief while researching constraints the project will face during council review.
3. Design Development This phase collects the results from the schematic design phase and takes them to the next stage. It finalises the design and specifies items such as materials and general structural details with full dimensions.
4. Construction Documents Once the project manager is comfortable with the designs and budget produced throughout the first 3 steps. Finalise the project with a much more detailed project scope, typically including specifications of the equipment to use, construction details, and timelines.
These steps will ensure that you avoid any waste of resources throughout the construction phase, and helps deliver a clearly defined project scope. It clearly outlines your project parameters, timelines, materials and your deliverables - leaving little room for error.
During the construction phase, it is common for project managers to make changes on-site; this can be due to a multitude of reasons such as, seeing a cheaper product, not understanding how something was designed, or simply changing their mind about a material. More often than not, these changes will cost more money and can lead to going over budget - especially when you deviate from the design strategy multiple times.
Having an on-site builder as a consultant during the design phase can give you peace-of-mind and ultimately help you stay on track in your renovation or new build, and deliver the finished result without any financial pitfalls.