Building Your Custom Home For Dummies. Peter Economy

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СКАЧАТЬ of selecting a contractor and help you understand your insurance needs for the project. Finally, we offer several tips on how to keep the home-building experience a happy one.

Organizing and Documenting

      The custom-home process is chock-full of enough paperwork and procedures to give bureaucrats chills. Now is the time to be honest with yourself: Are you truly an organized person? If so, this section is simply a series of reminders and ideas for you to embrace. If not, don’t be intimidated by the challenges ahead of you. Find someone in your family who is organized, or hire someone to help you prepare for the large organizing task ahead. One good resource is the National Association of Productivity & Organizing (www.napo.net). You can also check out Organizing For Dummies by Eileen Roth with Elizabeth Miles (Wiley).

      Building a workbook and portable file system

      To start a difficult project like the one you’re thinking of undertaking, you need a central place to store all the original paperwork you’re about to accumulate. Because each transaction creates its own set of paperwork, you want to get organized; otherwise, you’ll end up drowning in all that paper! A typical construction project usually generates enough paperwork to fill a two-drawer file cabinet. Not only do you need to store all this paperwork, but also you’ll need to easily retrieve it throughout the process. Here are some suggested categories for your filing system:

       Architecture and design

       Contractor communication

       Contracts

       Financing

       Invoices

       Land purchase

       Materials information

       Paid receipts

       Permits and approvals

       Subcontractor communication

       Warranties

      

Many people start out with a single notebook and find it fills up very quickly. We recommend using a permanent and portable system instead. Use the following efficient, step-by-step method for having pertinent information at your fingertips, whether you’re at home, in your office, or at your construction site:

      1 Create a loose-leaf binder with dividers for the categories in the previous bulleted list.

      2 After looking at each document, decide whether you may need it at the site.If you may need it at the site, make a copy and proceed to Step 3. If you won’t need it at the site, proceed to Step 4.

      3 File the copy you made in your binder.

      4 Place the original in your home file system.

      5 Review your binder every day, adding the necessary documents from your file system.

No doubt you’ll receive email and texts from your building team. These electronic forms of communication help the people collaborating on your project to easily pass along and share invoices, designs, pictures, and memos. The great thing about emails and texts is that they’re easy to store without taking up any space in your file cabinet. Consider setting up folders or tags in your email system to sort information for all the subjects and people you communicate with. This way, you can easily reference prior communication and share it if needed. You can also create a shared folder structure in an online storage platform like Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) or Google Drive (https://drive.google.com) to collect documents. Your builder may use an online tracking system to help you keep notes, documents, photos, and other files organized. If you need help navigating a system like this, ask your builder for a tutorial or search for one online.

      Calendar and communication: Your smartphone is your friend

      Keeping your project on schedule is a major project in itself. You and your contractor need to coordinate all the actions in a construction project. For example, your electrical systems can’t be installed until the framing is complete, and the house can’t be framed until the foundation is installed. With so many people dependent upon the time frame of others, you need a simple way to keep track of everything, even if your contractor is managing the schedule.

      

Proactive communication is probably the single most important factor for a successful custom home. Make yourself easily available by phone, email, or text so your contractor or architect can reach you when they need you. Be prepared to respond to messages promptly; otherwise, if your crew runs into a snag, the project can sit in limbo while your contractor waits for you to check in and return messages — costing you time and money. If you’re a recluse or shy when it comes to dealing with people, you may need to adjust your lifestyle and contact management approach until your project is completed.

      Staying in close contact requires you to have immediate portable access to phone numbers for your contractor, architect, loan officer, and other key players.

      Be sure to create contacts in your smartphone for every team member on your project. Fill out the contact information as fully as possible so you don’t get confused between Phil the trim carpenter and Phil from your city’s building department. Sharing contacts with your partner or other interested parties is a good way to keep everyone in the loop on the project.

If electronics aren’t your thing, we highly recommend a Franklin Planner from www.franklincovey.com. They come in many sizes that can also serve as your planning notebook. You can keep all your contact information, as well as your calendar, with a pencil and have it ready whenever you need it. And if you use a planner, your batteries will never go dead because — unlike smartphones and laptops — planners never have to be charged!

      Being the bean counter: Keeping track of your finances

      Even though you may have a contractor and bank involved, ultimately, the job of managing the finances falls on you. You need to keep track of every dollar spent as you go, or you can have a very unpleasant surprise: running out of money in the middle of the project.

      

We recommend setting up a separate bank account early on for everything construction related. Setting up this account can help remove confusion and allow for easier record keeping. Keeping a file for each vendor and filing invoices and receipts in chronological order also make life easier when looking for something later. Loose papers become a nightmare when you need something quickly. (See the “Building a workbook and portable file system” section, earlier in this chapter, for specific tips on keeping files organized.)

      If you’re comfortable using a computer, managing the finances is an easier СКАЧАТЬ