The Design Phase of Your Project. The basic rule of thumb is if your project costs more than 5% of the value of your house, or if you are making structural changes to the interior or exterior of your home, or if you a making major changes to the floor plan of your home, you need an architect for your project.

This is the part of the project where you need to find an architect. The best way to go about this is to find a full service contractor who can manage the entire project. Going this route will add significant value and save you a lot of money over the life of your project. The contractor will work with the architects on almost every job. They should have longterm relationships with many very good architects in the Denver area. This will allow you to get better pricing for their services for your project than you can by contacting them.

Once you select the architect you want to use for your project, the contractor will work with the architect throughout the design process to make sure they are designing a project that fits into your budget. We cannot minimize how important this is for the success of your project and we have seen many projects never get off the ground because this step was not followed. Your architect is not paid to tell you no. If you tell him you want something, he assumes you can afford it. The time to determine how much your project is going to cost is during design, not after design is complete.

Before the contractor starts the work, you should sit down with them and have a project kickoff meeting. At this meeting you will go over the construction estimate with you in detail as well as present you with a construction schedule so you can make plans to minimize the effect of the project on your day to day life. You will also be provided with a list of items you need to select, the budget for those items (with the contractor discount), and the schedule of when those items need to be selected to meet the construction schedule.

Once the construction has begun, the contractor should communicate with you about the status of the project however often you like, but we recommend status meetings weekly at a minimum. If something comes up of major importance they should contact you immediately. They should never proceed with work that is different than the original estimate before they have approval from you in writing.