Finding our Design/Build Firm
10 months ago, I wrote the first post on this blog that mentioned our upcoming renovation. We’d been saving up for five years at that point and had a decent idea of how much money we could borrow to supplement our cash to finance the work, but we hadn’t actually talked budgets with anyone yet.
Not for lack of trying, mind you - I’d reached out to a few design/build firms to get a sense of how much what we wanted to do would cost so we could have a savings goal, but none would give me an estimate without hiring them to draw up preliminary plans. So we decided on our own and, when we reached it last spring, I started vetting firms.
(We knew we wanted to work with a design/build firm because neither one of us has the bandwidth to serve as a project manager on a major project like this. Using an architect and contractor would be cheaper, but it would also require us to be more hands-on, which just isn’t a viable option at this stage.)
I found firms in our area by scrolling through recommendations on online community forums, projects posted on Houzz, and taking note of signs in the yards of houses under construction. In one case, I emailed the realtor of a house I saw for sale on Redfin to ask who the sellers used for their (clearly recent) reno because I liked the work so much! I ended up setting up five consults over the course of a few weeks, and narrowed that list down to two and then finally one.
It was easy to reject the “top” two firms from consideration; I realized it wasn’t worth the premium of paying for their names. A few friends also told me that the firms are known to pay attention to their higher-end clients, the ones that will land them in design magazines, but that the clients spending less money get considerably less care. Jon and I both liked the work of a mid-sized firm, but the owner/lead who came to work with us spent much of our meeting bemoaning how much more expensive it is to work in DC than out in Maryland and we just didn’t want to deal with that attitude for the next year.
Our two finalists were an independent architect with a contracting business and a smaller local design/build firm, both of which had extensive experience working on DC rowhouses. While I liked the idea of being only one of a handful of projects the former would be working on, we went with the latter in the end; I appreciated their practical approach to both the project and to us, since clients have to be managed just as projects do, and felt like we connected well with everyone on the team.
We signed a contract in May and, in June, they came to take formal measurements of our home to draw up plans!
