There is where we may start to look a little different than other contractors you may be talking to. While some contractors like to offer a “cost plus” or “time and material” type contract, we prefer to give actual hard cost proposals. What’s the difference you may ask, it’s simple. A cost plus contract is simply that, you as a home owner will pay all of the associated costs of the job to cover any labor or materials, and then you will also pay the “plus” portion which is typically a percentage of those costs that you pay to the contractor as his or her fee for managing the project. This is where the horror stories of costs overruns for remodel contracts come from. Simply put there is no real incentive for the contractor to meet their budget because you are committed to paying all of the costs and then the plus, so if cost overruns happen it is paid for by the customer not the contractor. While there are times where this flexibility is needed and helpful, for most clients we find that a major source of stress for determining whether to do a remodel or not is having confidence in the costs up front before the job starts.
This is where June Belle Homes comes in to help. Part of our process is to build the house on paper before we ever swing a hammer or move a shovel of dirt. In this phase we will come in to your project and field measure every part of the home being affected. We then go to work creating house plans of how your home exists today (called as built plans) as well as drawing up plans for what you want to happen in your space. This is where you really get to start seeing the project come to life on paper. Once we get the design nailed down to what you want, we can start sending out your plans to get the hard cost quotes we mentioned earlier. As you may have guessed, there is a lot of work that goes into this phase of your project which is why many contractors choose not to do this style of cost proposal. While we would love to be able to provide this service to every potential client at no charge, there will be some real time and work that go into this phase of your project, so we do collect a design fee to complete this part of the job. But no worries, once the design phase is complete you get to keep all the plans we create whether you choose to have June Belle Homes do the work or you decide to go with another contractor.