Guides & How-To Articles
The questions that matter most on a project are rarely about the building. They are about who to hire, what a bid means, what to have ready and what to do when the schedule slips. These articles answer them the way we answer them on site.
Dealership showroom renovations and brand image updates
The manufacturer's rep walked the renovated showroom with a binder open to the finish schedule, checking the floor tile against a sample she had approved eight…
Read the article →Car wash lobbies and detail centers: the interiors around the tunnel
The last thing we finish before a car wash reopens isn't the tunnel, it's the pay booth glass and the last coat of paint in the detail bay where a customer wai…
Read the article →The punch list: how a job actually gets finished
The punch walk on a hotel floor starts at the elevator lobby with the owner, the designer, a roll of blue tape and the project manager who has been on the job…
Read the article →Working through a Texas summer: heat, crews and the schedule
By two in the afternoon in late July an unconditioned Houston space with the ceilings still open can climb well over a hundred degrees inside, and a framing cr…
Read the article →Six budgeting errors that sink commercial projects (and the fixes)
Halfway through a hotel renovation an owner showed us the spreadsheet he had built eighteen months earlier. The construction number was close. What was missing…
Read the article →Design-build or design-bid-build: choosing how to buy your project
An owner called us last spring with a finished set of drawings, three bids that did not agree with each other, and a lease date that had already been pushed on…
Read the article →Five things to get answered before you sign a construction contract
The contract that lands in an owner's inbox the week before mobilization is usually forty pages, and the owner usually reads the price on page one and the sign…
Read the article →Renovating through hurricane season on the Texas Gulf Coast
A hotel general manager called us two summers ago because a renovation on the property next door lost its scaffolding and a stack of exterior material in one a…
Read the article →Building a commercial build-out budget that holds
The budget that gets a tenant in trouble is almost never the construction number. It is the number that was never written down: the permit fees, the design rev…
Read the article →Five ways to tell your general contractor has the job under control
You can learn more about how a job is being run from twenty minutes on site than from a month of progress reports. The way the material is stacked, who walks o…
Read the article →Commercial build-out timelines: what sets the finish date
The calendar in our job trailer runs backward. It starts with the day the owner needs to open and works toward the first day of demolition. When an owner asks…
Read the article →Licensed and insured: what to ask for before your builder starts
We get asked for our certificate of insurance maybe once for every ten contracts we sign. The other nine owners took the phrase on the website at face value. M…
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