Pre-Planning and Contingency Expectation

When meeting with clients, I find that if we are thorough in the planning process, we can do a pretty good job of minimizing unexpected change orders. Through experience, Impact can anticipate potential problems and educate the client so that informed budgets can be determined before we start work. With old homes, you just don’t always know what you’re going to get, but you have to be ready for it and plan conservatively. Case in point for this Arlington addition underway.

As the project started moving forward, everything was going well during the demolition and excavation phase- until we discovered that the existing house didn’t have a foundation wall! This was kind of a problem- without a foundation wall so support the load of the house, the new addition couldn’t be built (think of a sand castle that starts to sink once the ocean water hits it). We needed to come up with an alternate plan. We determined that the best way to deal with the problem was to support the existing structure with new steel beams and columns (with proper concrete footers). The steel beams are an engineered product- very strong, very efficient in size, and also made of a very high concentration of recycled steel. Careful planning was necessary- after all, we still had a house underneath it. Pictures are below. Job done- now getting back to the ‘original’ scope. Most importantly, we budgeted for this type of potential contingency, so the project can move forward as planned.