How to Stress a Marriage or, Should You Be Your Own General Contractor?

Recently, my wife Kelly and I set out to answer that age-old question; should you serve as your own general contractor? We had just discovered that Kelly was pregnant, and it didn’t take a genius to see that we needed more room. We put our plans for a kitchen remodel on hold, and began planning a 1,000-square foot two bedroom/two bath addition. After receiving rather high bids from professional GCs, we decided to head down the GC path alone, notwithstanding that both of us have full-time jobs.

Addition during construction.

After construction the Norlin family now have a new 1,000-square foot addition to their home.

The Planning Process
At the outset, it is important to know that the best thing about being your own GC is that you control the process. You can choose your own subcontractors, control the timeline of the project, and have things the way you want them. What’s the worst thing? It’s that you control the process. You have to find subs, develop a workable timeline, and have to figure out what you want before you begin. Proper planning is an essential part of the job and involves no less than 20 hours working with project management software. I finally came up with what I considered to be an efficient yet realistic plan for getting the project completed in four months. At the same time, in order to get the project off the ground, we were designing a workable floor plan and meeting with architects in order to develop a set of blueprints that would get city approval.

Our first major blunder was a lack of familiarity with the City of Portland’s love of shear walls. Unfortunately, the low-cost designer who drew our blueprints was similarly clueless about shear walls, which led to a severe delay in the permit approval process. Plans went to the city, to our designer, to the engineer, back to the designer, to the city, back to the designer… well, you get the idea. My “conservative estimate” of six weeks for plan approval was woefully inadequate.

Another crucial part of the planning process was finding suitable subcontractors. In discussing our project with friends, we consistently received two pieces of advice: get at least three bids for each task and don’t always accept the lowest bid. We didn’t follow this advice, although we should have. While we got more than three bids for some tasks, we only got one for some tasks, mainly due to laziness on our (well, my) part. This proved to be a mistake.We later found that we could have gotten a much better deal on some parts of the project. This takes me to the second piece of advice that we failed to heed: don’t automatically accept the lowest bid. Well, we usually did that, as we were “GCing” the job ourselves in large part to save money. In two instances, the lowest-priced subs were cheap for a reason, and what we saved in price we paid for in lack of craftsmanship.

The Construction Process
After two months of planning, the project got underway. We were pleased with how quickly the framing went, in part due to a provision in our framing contract that gave the contractor an incentive payment for finishing ahead of schedule (and a penalty for delay). One thing we failed to realize at the outset was that the general is responsible for “scrapping out,” or site clean up, which meant that most of my weekends were spent taking a utility trailer to the dump. Of course, we could have subbed out this task, but remember — we were saving money, right? Because I was also doing the wiring and the plumbing supply lines, this meant that I was working every night from when I got home from my real job until midnight and all weekend long. This put further stress on our relationship.

Because demolition was involved, the obligatory pains of living in a construction zone were present the dust, the lack of a kitchen roof, and gallons of water pouring into the kitchen after a compression fitting was kicked off a toilet stub-out in a wall being removed (well, perhaps this last one is not obligatory). Oops! If you ask Kelly what the low point of the project was, she would almost surely say that this was it (unless she says that it was when I attempted to fix the offending water line, only to turn the water on to test my soldering job to find the cap was not soldered well enough, which caused more water to pour into the kitchen).

Another memorable low point was realizing at 9:00 pm the night before the drywall was to be hung that the plumber forgot to cap a test pipe in the DWV system and I forgot to put in the outdoor hose bib we wanted. Off I went to the home improvement center and was up much of the night finishing these tasks so I did not have to delay the dry wallers for a third time!

Of course, there were high points as well – coming home from work to see the progress. Often a high point is immediately followed by a low point, such as when beautiful tongue and groove cedar siding is installed one day, only to have careless roofers the next severely damage the siding by tossing concrete tiles onto the roof (apparently, these clowns did not realize that when the guy on the roof misses, the tile crashes into and gouges the cedar. What was more frustrating was that it took them no less than 10 missed tiles before they stopped!) Fortunately, due to good contract provisions, we were able to deduct the cost of replacing the siding from the roofing bill and protect ourselves from a construction lien in the process.

Should You Do It?
While we learned many things while serving as our own GC, the top three lessons are as follows: first, if you are looking to save time, don’t be your own general. We can easily say that the project took twice as long due to our lack of experience and limited time. Second, be sure that you and your spouse can work together and are like-minded when it comes to what you are looking for in a finished product. Last, what we saved in money we paid for in sleepless nights worrying about what needed to be done before the next subs arrive, lack of free time, and lots of other unforeseen costs.

With that said, however, I am thankful for the experience. We followed the addition with the long-awaited kitchen remodel, which was a cakewalk to manage compared to the addition. I also learned a ton about construction and the construction project, knowledge that serves me well with even the smallest of projects. In addition, I also acquired many nifty power tools. Last, and perhaps best of all, we can tell our friends that the answer to that old age question is “yes” you can serve as your own general and live to tell about it.

Jonathan Norling is a partner in the Portland law firm Nelson Lovinger Norling Kaufmann LLP. He specializes in business law, including construction contracting, dispute resolution, and litigation. He can be reached at 503-230-8311 or norling@nlnk.com.