The realities of being an owner builder part 2: documentation, documentation, documentation
Previously in our series about the realities of owner-building, inspired by our real-life experience as architect and owner-builder of Casa Connection: a small home with ginormous ambitions, we’ve discussed the importance of getting all the red tape, permits and approvals sorted before kicking off on-site. One other key thing to sort out before the carpenters and sparkies arrive is documentation: ensuring you have drawings and details of all the important elements.
When you’re running the show as an owner-builder, it’s essential to be organised. A thorough set of documentation is key to your success (or failure). Before any project can commence, there’s a large amount of documentation that needs to be prepared, but that’s particularly true for owner-builders, where you can’t rely on years of experience to make educated guesses.
We’ve heard of owner-builders skimping on documentation or requesting just the bare minimum to get their project approved by council or to secure a building permit. While we certainly don’t believe in over documenting projects and expecting tradespeople to scour through pages and pages of intricate details, it’s essential that all of the important decisions in your project are accurately and clearly documented. Good documentation will pay for itself over and over:
When you’re paying trades by the hour, and organising their timelines, they need to understand what they’re doing
When you’re asking for cost estimates, the price is only every going to be as accurate as the information you have documented
When things change and you need to update all of the relevant people with the new information, you’ll need to revise documents, you can’t expect everyone to keep up with changes in their heads or via massive email chains
When conflicts or unexpected circumstances arise, you’ll want to refer to the documentation to understand the flow-on effects
And the list goes on…
Here is what a documentation set should contain and some other ways that clear and accurate documentation is an owner-builder’s BFF.
What’s in a documentation set?
A documentation set contains all the plans, elevations, and sections a builder will require to build your new home or renovation. Beyond the plans, elevations, and sections you probably expect as part of a building drawing set, there are other key documents that will prove very helpful to include as part of your documentation arsenal.
Finishes and fixtures schedules
As part of a comprehensive documentation set, you should have all of your internal finishes and fixtures documented in a schedule. This document will itemise every item like taps, sinks and basins, and even toilet roll holders. It will also list finishes like paint colours (handy for touchups down the track), carpets, and laminates. It will include the names and contact details of suppliers.
Internal elevations
You should have internal elevations of each of the important spaces like the bathrooms, kitchen, laundry, and any custom joinery or unique details you’d like to create. These elevations will explain how the interior spaces will look and will reference the finishes and fixtures schedule where relevant.
The bathroom elevations, for example, will show the extent of the tiling: is it floor-to-ceiling throughout or only in the shower and an upstand behind the basin? Of course, this could all be communicated to your trades in writing or informally through a chat, but, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words (and is far less likely to be forgotten or lost in a pile of unread emails). This also makes it a breeze for you (or your tradespeople) to calculate square meterage either for quoting or ordering purposes. These elevations should even show the tile layout so your tiler knows exactly what they need to do and can work away independently.
Similarly, the kitchen and bathroom internal elevations can be sent to a cabinet maker to price the work and help them understand any unique requirements you have.
Lighting and electrical plans
We’ve seen far too many people trying to work all this out while the electrician is on-site and it’s a disaster. The electrician ends up cranky because it slows them down and things get missed or messed up because it’s not adequately planned in advance. A lighting plan, usually communicated in a reflected ceiling plan, will show the electrician where each of your lights should go and how and where they should be switched. Even been to a house where the light switches are in weird places and you can never find them when you need them? They probably didn’t have a lighting plan!
Similarly, an electrical plan identifies where all the power points and
When creating or providing feedback on your lighting and electrical plans, it’s wise to consider each room and visualise how you’ll use each space. When you walk into the room, where would you expect to find the light switch? Is there a chance the light switch will end up hidden behind a curtain or be on the wrong side of a swing door?
When it comes to power points, try to be realistic about how many you will need. Does your current lounge area or home office have power boards plugged into power boards, plugged into double adaptors? Other than creating an annoying jumble of cables and, let’s face it, a fire risk, this is a sign there are simply not enough power points (or they’re in the wrong spots). How many devices or electronics are you likely to have? And where will they sit in the room? Don’t forget where you’ll charge your phone, vacuum cleaner, or plug in some floor lamps for the atmosphere.
To provide all the points you require, it would be wise to match or even increase the number of points in your new office or lounge; this is going to be the cheapest and easiest way to add an additional plug or two rather than getting an electrician in again in a few years time!
Documenting is time-consuming, but crucial
Naturally, all of this takes a lot of thought and a long time to prepare. We typically allow X hours to document a project, and that’s with years of experience preparing plans and interior elevations, and a library of products and materials we know and trust to specify from. So, if you haven’t done this before, prepare to spend even more time researching options online, visiting showrooms, and adjusting your schedules, plans, and elevations as your selections change.
Of course, all this can be prepared by an architect, and that just one reason why an architect can be an invaluable part of your owner-builder team, by helping you to prepare all the information you’ll need and coordinate drawings and design changes so everyone always has the latest information to work from.
A thorough set of documentation also helps you cut through red tape. By demonstrating to someone like a building surveyor, for example, that you have ticked all the required boxes and that you and your team are on top of the details, they’ll feel a lot more comfortable giving you that all-important stamp of approval.
And helps you deal with overwhelm and decision fatigue
Because our day job is as architects, the process of selecting finishes and fittings - deciding between the Carrara marble and the designer terrazzo - is somewhat easier. We know where to look for the products and materials we need. We know what questions to ask of the suppliers. And we can nimbly adapt to challenges like the product specified being out of stock or ceasing production between planning and construction!
But this doesn’t preclude us from the odd debilitating case of decision fatigue that so often plagues less experienced owner-builders.
In fact, this inside knowledge made our job even harder when we switched to designing and building for ourselves as owner-builders! There are almost endless possibilities and with such a broad knowledge of the materials, products, and fixtures available, so we experienced the struggle of honing in on the right fit for our project firsthand: it’s a challenge when you don’t have a traditional client’s needs, taste and budget to narrow your focus.
So, believe us when we say we understand the impact of decision fatigue!
As just one example, the experience of visiting a bathroom store or a lighting showroom can be overwhelming. Of course, there’s the sheer volume of choices to contend with. But, for each option, there are also other factors at play. For example, the feature light you love for the kitchen may not be dimmable and you don’t want friends visiting for an intimate dinner to feel like they’re being interrogated or operated on while they’re gathering around the island bench. Or perhaps the countertop basin you love requires a longer basin tap and that’s not available in the sexy rose gold finish you’ve chosen for all your other fittings!
It’s a lot of balls to juggle and every decision has a series of other impacts and trade-offs that must be balanced and considered. Preparing thorough documentation, or getting a pro to do it for you, helps you to methodically make these all-important decisions and ensures you don’t miss anything.
The worst thing you can do…
Given the complexity of these decisions and the flow-on effects of each decision you make, the absolute worst thing you can do is get into a state of decision paralysis and delay these decisions until the last minute.
Trust us, we learnt this the hard way! Because we were overwhelmed with decision fatigue, we fell into the trap of holding off on key decisions until the tradespeople were literally on-site – something we would never do on a client’s project!
On several occasions, we needed to make snappy decisions on the fly and adjust things after the fact to make them work. Partly, that’s the nature of building: there are always unexpected surprises you need to deal with, pronto. But the other factor at play was that, with time pressures from other projects we had on the go, and the unexpected difficulty of making design decisions on our own project (so many options!), we were caught off guard.
For the most part, this has been okay. We understand building in general, we’ve had our heads in the details of this particular project for longer than we could bear to calculate, and we are used to quickly making important decisions. However, it has added an additional level of stress to the project and caused delays.
So, our advice is to lock in your decisions early. Produce a clear set of documentation including schedules and internal elevations so both you and your trades can easily understand the details. Also, be rigourous about updating these documents when changes are made, so that they continue to reflect the built realities.
Or, here’s the big tip: if you don’t think you’ll be very good at staying on top of everything and keeping all this information organised and up-to-date, consider outsourcing it to an architect or designer! A good architect or designer can help you curate all the options available so it’s easy to make a decision. They’ll take care of all the documentation for you so you can be sure all the information is recorded and articulated to tradespeople. And they’ll even update all the documentation if and when there are changes so you can be sure you’re dealing with the most up-to-date information.