Articles
Materials, selection & how we build
Notes from the field on how we build: project guidance, material comparisons, and the occasional how-to for the trade.
What drives change order costs on a commercial project
Every commercial project runs into change orders, and every owner who has been through one has a rough sense that they cost more than they should. What is less…
Read the article →Senior living and assisted living construction costs
Senior living and assisted living construction costs get compared to standard multifamily numbers more often than they should be, because the buildings can loo…
Read the article →Apartment unit turn costs in Texas
Unit turn budgets vary more from unit to unit within the same property than most owners expect, because the biggest cost driver is not the unit's size or floor…
Read the article →Medical office build-out costs
A medical office build-out looks like a standard commercial interior from the hallway, but the systems behind the walls carry a level of mechanical, electrical…
Read the article →Warehouse construction cost per square foot in Texas
Warehouse construction looks like it should be one of the simpler things to put a per-square-foot number on: an open building with fewer finishes and fewer sys…
Read the article →Restaurant build-out cost per square foot
Two restaurants with the same square footage and a similar dining room can land on very different budgets, and the difference almost always traces back to the…
Read the article →Residential development: land to lots to finished homes
Residential development is really two builds stacked on top of each other: the horizontal work that turns raw land into buildable, platted lots with roads and…
Read the article →End-of-year construction planning: budgeting for next year's project
The fourth quarter is when a lot of commercial construction planning actually happens, even for projects that will not break ground until well into the followi…
Read the article →Gas station and convenience store construction
A gas station and convenience store project is really two projects that have to open on the same day: the fuel site, with its canopy, underground storage tanks…
Read the article →Mixed-use construction: building more than one use into one project
A mixed-use project asks a contractor to build more than one kind of building at the same time, inside the same structure or across the same site, and the hard…
Read the article →What a certificate of occupancy is and how to get one
A finished building is not automatically a building you can legally use. That authority comes from a certificate of occupancy, and owners who treat it as a for…
Read the article →Value engineering: cutting cost without cutting quality
Value engineering has a bad reputation with a lot of owners, usually because they have seen it done badly: a budget gets tight, and someone starts stripping fi…
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