When the Drawings and the Build Both Sit on Your Desk

Some jobs come to you as a finished set of drawings and a fixed scope. Others come to you as a brief and a budget, with the drawings still to be pinned down as the job runs. That second kind puts more on your plate, and more on your risk register, so it is worth being honest about what it actually demands from a contractor.

You own the gaps now

When you are responsible for turning a brief into buildable drawings as well as the construction itself, there is nowhere to point when something does not work on site. If a detail was never resolved, that is on you, not on someone down the corridor. Build in time to properly coordinate structural, services and finishes information before trades start cutting into materials, not after.

Stage the work, do not rush the front end

Break the job into clear stages: brief and scope, developing the drawings to a buildable standard, then delivery. Rushing the middle stage to get on site early is the single most common way these jobs go wrong. A week spent resolving details properly before handover to the site team saves weeks of variation and rework later.

Building regulations and CDM do not move

Whatever the procurement route, building regulations approval and CDM 2015 duties still apply in full, and they land on your desk earlier than on a traditional job because you are the one producing the information, not just building from it. Get approvals and duty holder responsibilities sorted before committing labour to site.

Price the risk, not just the work

This kind of contract carries more uncertainty than one built from a complete, fixed set of drawings, and the price has to reflect that. Build in proper contingency for coordination issues and late client decisions, and be upfront with the client about why the number looks the way it does. Vague pricing here is how contractors end up carrying costs that were never really theirs to carry.

Communicate early, communicate often

Clients often do not fully grasp how much is still being resolved once the contract is signed. Keep them close through every stage, flag decisions that need making before they hold up the programme, and put the reasoning behind cost changes in writing as you go.

Handled properly, taking on both the drawings and the build gives you more control over programme and quality than a traditional split ever will. Handled loosely, it is the fastest way to eat your own margin.

Send your drawings, or whatever you have of them so far, and we will put a number on the parts that are still moving.

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