What actually happens in week six

A change order is a written, priced amendment to the contract that you sign before the work happens. No signature, no work, no charge. There is no category of change that we make first and price afterwards. Changes come from three places: you change your mind, a concealed condition forces a change, or an authority requires something nobody anticipated. The first is entirely within your control and is much cheaper in design than in construction. The second is covered below. The third is rare and we absorb the administration of it. Each change order states the cost, the schedule effect, and the reason. The schedule effect is the part firms leave off, and it is often the part that matters more — a two-thousand-dollar change that adds three weeks is not a two-thousand-dollar change. If the volume of change orders on a job starts climbing, that is a signal something was wrong in design or in discovery, and we will say so rather than keep writing them.

It happens on most houses of any age. Rot at a sill, a wall that turns out to be carrying load, wiring that was never grounded, a drain line that has failed quietly for years, framing cut through by a previous renovation. In Houston, add foundation movement and slab plumbing that has been leaking under the house long enough to be part of the soil. Discovery exists to reduce the number of these, not to eliminate them. We open what can be opened before the contract is signed, and we tell you where we think the remaining risk sits and what it would cost if we are right. When one appears, the sequence is: stop, document with photographs, price the remedy, present the options, get a signature. You see the same photographs we do. We do not have a category of finding that gets fixed quietly and invoiced later. Where a condition is likely rather than certain, we would rather carry a named contingency in the contract than pretend it away. A contingency that is never spent is returned to you. A surprise that was never mentioned is not.

Usually, and most of our clients do. It is a different discipline from building an empty house, and it changes the sequence and the cost rather than the answer. We seal the work area and run it under negative pressure so dust travels out of the house instead of through it. We keep one working bathroom and some kitchen function wherever the scope allows, and when it does not, we say so before you sign rather than discovering it in week four. There are periods where staying is genuinely unpleasant: slab work, whole-house rewiring, the days when the water is off. We identify those in preconstruction and mark them on the schedule so you can plan around them, rather than finding out on a Tuesday morning. For a whole-home remodel, staying is often the wrong call — it lengthens the schedule and costs more than the rent it saves. We will tell you that even though moving out is the easier job for us.

Before anything is demolished: floor protection along every route the trades use, not just the work area. Temporary dust walls with zippered access. Negative air machines with filtration running for the duration. Covered and sealed HVAC returns so the system is not distributing the job through the whole house. Anything staying in place that cannot be moved is boxed and protected. Anything that can be moved, we move, and we photograph it before and after. The site is swept at the end of every day and the routes are cleared. There is no version of this where you step over a run of cable to get to your own bedroom. Deliveries, parking and skip placement are agreed with you before the start date, because on most Houston streets that is a conversation with your neighbours as much as with you, and it is better had early.