What To Remember When Hiring An Architect

What To Remember When Hiring An Architect

In the design process and the construction process, there are many people involved. When you consider everything from doing the survey of your site where their building will be built, designing it, coming up with concepts, developing construction documents, and then going into construction, it is a long process that involves a lot of people.

Communicate Your Budget

When you are analyzing your commercial construction project and determining a budget, it is essential to communicate that budget to your architect. Your architect will guide you through the whole process and then ultimately take the drawings they produce out to gather bids when the time arrives. The method of building a custom home requires a professional to guide you.

A residential architect has that kind of training that will walk you successfully through the entire process. There are so many steps that many homeowners don’t think about. Homeowners need to think about getting the funding for their project, or gathering building permits, and ensuring that the site has had proper testing. Testing is critical for your structure to come together correctly. Testing includes having a soils report and a technical report to confirm your soil’s not contaminated.

Get The Right Team

There’s such a long process. It’s essential to have the right team on your side to guide you through the entire process. That is probably the most critical thing to take away.

There are many pieces of advice that we could recommend in considering hiring an architect. There’re so many good architects out there. In a nutshell, the essential part to me is understanding that there needs to be a relationship. You have to be able to get along with that architect. That design professional is going to guide you and spend a lot of time with you. If you don’t have that trust, it’s going to be a nightmare. You have to have that trust.

A Little Patience Goes A Long Way

On top of that, there needs to be mutual patience. It’s a complicated process with many little details. It’s crucial that the architect can be patient with the homeowner and that the homeowner can be patient with the architect.

The design is the inception of the project and should include a robust set of drawings. If those drawings are not completed correctly, the whole project will suffer. So you do have to have a good relationship. The relationship is paramount.

Get The Right Credentials

Understand that your architect has the qualifications or credentials to provide you with what you need. If you address that part, the whole process will go more smoothly. Architects work with so many contractors, and in many ways, the design profession in the construction profession is derived from different backgrounds. The training is entirely different. The education both receive is unique. The culture at the job site versus the design studio is wildly different. For these reasons, a good architect ends up spending a lot of time with the client and the contractors during construction.

A good architect should be able to identify good and bad contractors. It is appropriate to ask an architect to either make a recommendation or give you an opinion on a particular contractor that you may be considering. Your architect should have a wealth of knowledge based on his experience on who the good contractors are out there.