Construction can be intimidating for those without firsthand experience. If you need to make a change to your home, it can seem like thousands of hurdles stand between you and your goal of a beautiful finished space.
What we know from generations of experience, however, is that construction is not something to be afraid of. Rather, construction is as straightforward as baking a cake.
Just like a recipe, a construction project is a series of events, that when followed in the right order, result in a beautiful finished creation.
Mise en place
Planning and preparation are key. If you were to preheat the oven and start mixing the ingredients with only a vague idea of what you want to create, you’d be left with a mess. Maybe you’d be able to turn it into something halfway decent, but you’ll be endlessly pivoting and harried in the process, and the odds of failure are much higher than those of success.
In construction, starting work before you have clearly defined all goals will leave you with a big mess. Communicating to all parties what determines success in the categories of function, budget, schedule, and aesthetic will make or break your project’s success.
In cooking, timing is everything. If you start baking too late before your party arrives and try to compensate by jacking up the temperature in the oven, you won’t get your cake any faster - you’d just be ruining your work and materials.
Likewise, in construction, rushing project progress can be much more harmful than anything. An overly aggressive timeline results in details being overlooked, and creates mistakes that will take even more time and money to fix. As the Navy SEALs say, “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
While it is easy to be intimidated when at a construction project site, seeing exposed framing and roughing, thinking to yourself that it seems impossibly far from the goal of a beautiful finished space, remember that you’re looking at all the ingredients.
If the chef takes the time to assemble them thoughtfully, in the right order, before long you will surely be enjoying the finished results.
This is why we like to take the time to ensure that every detail can be accounted for before construction begins. Take a look at our preconstruction offerings to learn more.