I get this question fairly often, and the short answer is no. What I usually prefer is to get involved before the plans are finished--in development, but incomplete.

There is misconception that you need to buy the land, hire an architect, finish the plans, make a bunch of selections, and then start calling builders for prices. Believe it or not, that's problematic. You can certainly do it that way--I just don't think it's the best or most effective way to build a custom home.

By the time I receive a completed set of plans, hundreds of decisions have already been made—square footage, foundation, rooflines, windows, structural details, finishes, mechanical systems, site orientation, and so on. Every one of those decisions has a cost associated with it. What if you got all that way only to...poopoo the project.

If nobody has been checking those decisions against the construction budget along the way, the first real estimate can be a pretty unpleasant surprise--and at that point, fixing it usually means redesigning something you've already paid to design...which costs money.

The Builder Shouldn't Be the Last Person at the Table

I spent a good portion of my career in construction project management, so I tend to look at design through a slightly different lens. I absolutely care about what the house looks like and how it functions. But while we're looking at a set of drawings, I'm also thinking about how we're going to build it.

What's happening with the foundation? What's the roof doing? How are we getting equipment onto the site? Is that beam necessary? What's the lead time on those windows? Can you navigate furniture around that landing wall? How complicated are we making the mechanical systems? Are we creating a detail that's going to require three different trades to come back twice? And, of course, how does this affect the budget?

These aren't questions that should first come up when the drawings are 100% complete. An architect or designer has a job to do--and a builder has their role too. The best results I've seen come when those two sides of the project are working together instead of one finishing their work and tossing it over the fence to the other.

Here's what I want you to avoid: A client spends months designing a house. They get it exactly where they want it. They've stared at the floor plans long enough that they can practically walk through the house in their head.

Then they send it out for pricing and oof--the budget is $700,000 and the estimate at $950,000. Now what?

We're not really value-engineering at that point. We're taking things away.

The porch gets smaller the windows change size and brand. The roof gets simplified. Finished space disappears. Selections get downgraded. Plans go back to the architect for revisions. Just a plain old fashioned mess, and nobody enjoys that process. The frustrating part is that a lot of it can be avoided if someone is keeping an eye on construction cost while the design is developing.

A Budget Isn't a Bid

There's an important distinction here and I'm not suggesting that a builder can give you a firm construction price based on a sketch and a conversation. We can't--there are too many unknowns. What we can do is establish a working budget and keep testing the design against it as more information becomes available.

In effect and early on, you and I are working with broad numbers and assumptions. As the plans develop, we replace assumptions with actual quantities, specifications, subcontractor input and selections.

These numbers will give us a better idea as the information gets more nailed down. By the time we arrive at a construction contract, the design and budget should have been talking to each other for months. That's a much healthier/fluid process than finishing a design and essentially crossing your fingers while builders price it.

The Dirt Matters Just as Much as the Drawings

The other reason I want to be involved early is the site, especially around Central Virginia. I may be looking at a completely different project depending on the piece of land. Believe it or not, if you're like me and live not too far off 95 in Hanover, that line--being the highway that runs North and South--can tell me what kind of dirt you might expect.

Further, a nice flat lot with public utilities and easy road access is one thing, and a wooded five-acre parcel with a 600-foot driveway, an alternative septic system, a well, substantial clearing and a house sitting well off the road is something else entirely. The house plans could be identical yet the project budgets won't be.

Before we get too far into designing the house, I want to understand where we're putting it, how we're getting to it, how we're servicing it and what it's going to take to get the site ready for a foundation. I'm also looking ahead.

If you tell me you eventually want a detached garage, pool, ADU or workshop, I want to know that now. We may not build it for five years, but let's not put the septic field where the garage needs to go. These are the kinds of decisions that are cheap when they're lines on paper and expensive once we're moving dirt.

What Do You Actually Need Before You Call Me?

Not much, to be honest. If you're serious about building, I want to know what you're trying to accomplish, where you want to build and what you're comfortable spending--that's enough for an initial conversation.

If you own the land, lets talk about it. If you're considering buying land, I'd actually encourage you to call before you close on it. There are plenty of things we can look at during due diligence that may affect whether the property makes sense for what you're trying to build.

If you have plans, bring them, and i can doodle a sketch on a legal pad (believe it or not, I have a design background as well). Also, if you've saved 75 pictures of houses and kitchens on your phone from pinterest, that's useful too.

I'm not expecting you to show up knowing the difference between engineered floor trusses and I-joists--that's my job. What I do want is an honest conversation about priorities.

What are the things you absolutely want in the house? What's negotiable? What's the budget? What are you trying to accomplish five or ten years from now? That's a great start.

What If I Already Have Finished Plans?

Then we start there, no worries. There's nothing wrong with coming to Lakewood with a completed set of construction documents. I'll review the plans, look at the site, talk through the specifications and start developing pricing.

But if you're reading this because you're currently debating whether to call a builder now or wait until the architect finishes the drawings, make the call now.

There's very little upside to keeping the person responsible for building and pricing the project out of the conversation until the design is finished--I mean, that's really what pre-construction is all about: mitigating/managing perspective.

Pre-construction gets thrown around as an industry term, but it doesn't need to be complicated, but it should be taken more seriously. To me, it's simply doing as much problem-solving as possible while the solutions are still relatively inexpensive, and done our due diligence.

Through this process, we've look at the property, develop the plans, built the budget, and work through selections. We'll identify long-lead items, get subcontractor input where we need it, find the holes and fill them. And so on, and we keep doing that until we have something we're comfortable actually building. We're never going to eliminate every surprise from construction, anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been doing this very long. But we can eliminate a lot of avoidable ones.

My Advice?

If you're thinking seriously about building a custom home, don't wait until you have a perfect set of plans to talk to a builder. Get the builder involved while the project still has some flexibility. I'd rather tell you during schematic design that a particular idea is likely to add $40,000 to the project than tell you the same thing after you've paid someone to fully design and engineer it.

Maybe you love the idea and decide it's worth every penny. Great. Love it. Keep it. Let's do it. Maybe you'd rather spend that $40,000 somewhere else. Also great.

The important part is that you're making the decision when you still have options.

That's how I prefer to approach custom construction at Lakewood. The architect or designer handles what they're good at. We handle what we're good at. And instead of waiting until the end to find out whether the design and budget agree, we figure it out together as we go.

If you're considering building a custom home in Central Virginia, you don't need finished plans before you call. You just need a place to start.

Best, Adam