Two steps forward one step back
Life of a Construction Project Series
The goal for the project was pretty straightforward: take an open loft space with a mezzanine, built in the ’90s and update it to become a stylish modern space. The plan was to redo the two bathrooms and the kitchen, refinish the floors, put in a new closet system, new HVAC, and a cool modern staircase. No structural work, no penetrations to the envelope, no major relocation of plumbing or electrical. Simple, all I need is for K to select the finishes and we’re off to the races. Right? Wrong.
First off I just want to say that my client, who I’ll call K, is great. She’s super-engaged, excited about the space, interested in design, and she knows what she likes. She’s got good taste, which makes everything easier, and better. She also appears to be fairly affluent, so there is some flexibility in the budget, which always helps. But, as I will find out, flexibility is a relative term…
The kitchen
The first indication that things wouldn’t be so easy was when we met after signing the contract to start selecting finishes. We had worked hard to get the budget down to where she wanted it before signing the contract, and as a result we decided to reuse the existing appliances and I had proposed we use flat pack cabinets for the kitchen. I’d used the flat pack system before on a project and found they offer a lot of value; for about half the cost of typical mid-range cabinets you can get a great set of cabinets, but they show up un-assembled. It’s kind of like IKEA, but with way more options in terms of style, material and construction, and much higher quality. The only problem is, there’s no showroom, so you can’t see the cabinets until you get them. For me that’s no problem, I know what they’re going to look like. For my client though, it was too big a leap. She knew what she wanted, and I knew that the flat pack cabinets could meet her design goals, but I couldn’t show her that, and so we had to abandon the flat packs. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for me. The flat pack route is a lot more work, and it can be risky. I have to certify the measurements and design myself, and if anything gets messed up, or K doesn't like the cabs then it’s on me.
K found a local cabinet company via Google search that she liked the looks of. The showroom is in the design district, next to my favorite furniture shop Coup De Ta. We visited them at their showroom and K liked what she saw. A lot of picking cabinets comes down to aesthetics, and there are a lot of subtleties in the design that makes one manufacturer different than another. Certain finishes that are proprietary, subtle color differences, configurations and presentation distinguish one high-end cabinet supplier from another.
This is the construction equivalent of Haute Couture: that T-shirt from Gucci doesn’t really do anything differently than the Hanes special from Target, but it costs $1000 more. Is it better? Hard to say, some people would probably argue the opposite. Nonetheless, there is a market out there for $1000 t-shirts. I would argue the same is true for high-end European cabinetry. It isn’t better constructed and it doesn’t function any better (in fact some would argue the opposite), but there is a market out there for expensive European cabinetry because it offers things the alternatives don’t.
So there we were, in the Gucci of cabinet shops, and pretty much right there on the spot she decides to go with some very nice French cabinets, manufactured in Italy and shipped via shipping container to be installed by specialists to ensure warranty coverage.
So much for the budget.
This is the interesting thing about budgets: they don’t really exist. That is, they are a snapshot of your project at a certain moment. In the next moment, after picking cabinets that are $50K over the initial budget, your new budget is $50K higher. Does this mean you are ‘over budget’? I don’t think so, it means you changed your mind and that decision increased the budget. Budgets tend to be fluid, tracking up or down depending on what you uncover from day to day, and decisions the client makes. This can be a hard thing to communicate to the client, unfortunately. I find that once you give someone a number for a project they tend to keep that number in their head no matter what decisions they make.
Making this even more challenging is the language barrier between contractor and client. So many times I’ve had clients tell me, ‘Hey, we really need to get the budget down and we’re willing to do whatever it takes’. Ok, I say, if we do X, Y and Z, we can get the budget to where you want it. Great they say, let’s do it, that sounds fine, we don’t really feel that strongly about X, Y and Z anyway so this will be easy. Well, everything’s fine for a moment, and then guess who appear on the horizon, none other than X, Y and Z. Clients see them out there, and they say ‘Hey, who are those guys, we don’t recognize them’. I say ‘that’s X, Y and Z, remember? The guys whose legs we chopped off at the knee to get the budget where you wanted it’. Oh, they say, didn’t realize that’s what we were talking about, I don’t think that’s going to work.
For now, let’s fast forward a month and a half. K signed the deal for the Gucci cabs in mid-June. The kitchen guy still had to do the renderings and finalize the design, but by the end of June that was done and it seemed like we were on track to meet our target installation window of early to mid-October. Great, I’m thinking, we’re going to have sweet cabinets and they’re actually going to get here when we need them.
It’s now a month later and the cabinets haven’t been ordered. Not only that, but apparently ‘Europe’ goes ‘on holiday’ for a month this time of year, so now instead of 3 months it looks more like 4. And that’s from when the order actually gets placed, which hasn’t happened yet, but ‘could happen in the next week and a half’ according to the cabinet guy. Why weren’t they ordered, K says? I thought when I paid the deposit and signed off on the design that that was it and they were ordered, what happened? It’s a good question, but unfortunately there isn’t a satisfying answer. It’s not clear why they weren’t ordered, or even why they still haven’t been ordered even after this miscommunication has been uncovered.
Needless to say, K is a bit dismayed. She really liked the cabinets and was ok with the cost, but now she’s going to have to wait until December to get them, and then they have to be installed. And then the countertop guys can come in and template, which means we’ll be installing countertops around Christmas, which is always a mess. After that we can get the appliances installed, so she should have a functioning kitchen by mid-January.
So now we’re back to the drawing board, searching for cabinet alternatives that can meet our design goals and be delivered in our now tight timeline. I’m not optimistic, but curious what we’ll find when we start digging around and asking hard questions in SF’s design
This project is supposed to be done by mid-November. Of course, who knows if that’s realistic, there are a ton of things that could derail us, some known, some unknown. One thing I do know is that if the cabinets don’t show up until December then the project is definitely not going to be done by mid-November. Staying on schedule is a constant battle, and if you let your guard down for a minute you fall behind. In reality, in order to stay on schedule, you need to be trying to stay ahead of schedule, because things almost always take longer than you want; subs push their start date, shipments get delayed, something shows up damaged and has to be re-ordered, you fail an inspection, etc. Every day you gain is a day of that will inevitably get eaten up by some unforeseen delay in the future, and so you need to get those extra days in the bag when you can. That’s why it’s so tough to swallow an 8 month delay right at the beginning, it basically means that none of that makes any difference: no matter what you do, how well you run the job and how efficiently you manage the process, if I get things done on schedule I’m still going to be waiting for the cabinets for a month or more. It’s demoralizing and rubs my puritan values the wrong way.
The flip side of this, however, is that if we go this route and wait for the slow boat from Italy, the pressure is essentially off of me for the same reasons just mentioned. Lack of time pressure will allow us to make better design decisions and wait for the subs with the best combination of time, quality, and cost.
Option 2 also means less gray hair for me, not an insignificant factor these days.
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