• Design and Engineering
• Review Scope of Work
• Define Project schedule and deliveries
• Budget and cash flow analysis
• Land and site review
• Contract methods

As a full scale general contractor, Urban Wood Construction has the experience of tendering, planning, building, cost analysis and management on a wide range of projects. You can be confident that we take the responsibility of building your project very seriously. We are building our reputation for meeting budgets and committing to deadlines. Our innovative approach and team mentality has proven to be advantageous in competitive markets.

Via email and/or phone we connect to discuss your requirements, location, timing and rough budget. During this exchange we try to answer any general questions you may have, and determine whether our company might be a good fit for your needs.

We setup an appointment for us to visit you at your property. There is no charge for this visit. We do a walk-through together and discuss your ideas and questions. If you already have plans or sketches, or any other reference materials such as magazines or other pictures that may help to convey what you’re hoping to achieve, we review these together. If possible, we try to offer you a rough idea of the overall cost of the project you’re considering, and we will provide you with a quotation for the first phase of design/consulting services that would allow us to be working together.

Usually for a fixed fee, the preliminary design services phase is intended to be a kind of feasibility study for the project. We help you develop a conceptual plan layout that will meet your requirements, determine reasonably and accurately how much the construction would cost, and establish whether there will be any constraints or complications getting the necessary approvals from the city.
It includes the following:

• Taking detailed measurements of your entire existing house.
• Preparing floor plans and elevation drawings of the house.
• If you have a survey of the property, we prepare a site plan reflecting the house on the property.
• The project manager and our architect meet with you with the existing plans in-hand to discuss your ideas and objectives in more detail.
• We contact the appropriate city to obtain what information we can about the zoning of the property.
• We prepare preliminary design drawings based on the information we’ve gathered. Sometimes we’ll prepare a few different design options, depending on circumstances.
• We meet with you again to present and discuss the preliminary drawings. Usually there will be new ideas and questions that will arise from the first set of plans, so our architect will make edits and adjustments as required, and will provide updated plans.
• This process may repeat itself once or twice, in order to arrive at a plan version that you’re happy with. This can involve additional meetings, or sometimes more efficiently, exchanging drawing updates and ideas via email.

Assuming no zoning variances or other special approvals are required, or that we’ve already obtained any such required approvals, the next step is to prepare permit drawings and submit for a building permit, and where necessary, plumbing and/or heating permits. This process typically takes 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the scope of work. Fees vary accordingly.

Beyond the technical submissions necessary to obtain the permits, there are typically other details and final decisions for products, fixtures, electrical and lighting plans, and there are sometimes adjustments to the plans that the city requires for one reason or another. We assemble these items together into a complete and final For-Construction set of drawings.

Once we have the drawings and specifications for the project sufficiently nailed down, we prepare a construction proposal to you, which if accepted serves as our agreement to move forward with the actual construction project. The timing for when this occurs in the process depends on the circumstances. The later we wait through the design process before establishing the construction agreement, the more certain we can be of the construction costs, and can therefore commit to a fixed price for all or most elements of the construction. However, until we have a construction agreement in place, we can’t commit our resources to necessarily being available to commence the project on your preferred schedule so sometimes some compromise is required, whereby we establish the construction agreement before we’ve finalized all aspects of the scope of work. We can then commit to being available to undertake the work on the agreed schedule, but have an understanding that there may some variance in the final price of some elements of the construction accordingly.