One of the challenges you will face when building a house is selecting a good home builder.
This is an important consideration because as we have seen before, failure to get the right person for the job, has often led to the collapse of houses, resulting in deaths of tens of people and loss of millions of shillings.
Below is a guide to selecting a home builder.
The first is experience. Home building is a sophisticated science and requires a perfect blend of experience and good education.
Experience
For basic homes, one will need an architect for planning purposes, and a civil engineer or a building engineer to help in the technical structural bits and take the house from the blueprints to the real roof.
It is important to narrow down to what the builder has done in the past, with a focus on their experience in doing what you need their services for. For instance, it may not be good enough to hire a builder with experience on rails and roads, and has never worked on a housing project.
It is advisable at times to book appointments to visit the projects they have worked on and gauge their prowess. During such a visit, you can easily see the quality of their work.
Also, many builders have their own standard house designing and detailing methods that usually differ from other builders’.
In case you outsourced the plans from other engineers, your builder should be able to read both the architectural and structural drawings and understand them well.
If they do not understand something in the drawings, it doesn’t mean they are not fit for the job.
It may be that the plan designer may have used standards that aren’t locally agreeable. In such instances, consulting engineers who approved the plans and structural drawings can help.
A consulting engineer’s work is to bring clarity where there may be doubts and questions, and also to oversee the project from start to completion and ensure that all is done as per the design.
A good builder will also advise you on additional requirements and modifications on the home plan such as drainage system or tank position.
Uniqueness
Also consider builder uniqueness and differentiation.
It is important to have many options to select from. There are many people who claim they can do something cheaply or faster.
When selecting a builder, it is important to pick one who stands out.
This can be observed from their views on your home building.
Ask them if they will be comfortable with you making changes that may draw them back a few steps, even if that would attract an extra fee.
Such changes could include swapping the kitchen and the third bedroom.
Remember completion time. Building a home is exciting, and if it can be finished overnight, many people would build every day.
Timely completion is important and is every developer’s desire.
However, this should never be a life-and-death consideration when selecting a builder.
In building a house, quality should be given more priority than completion time, although, the timing should be also reasonable enough.
Cost implications
Cost implications is another front. They say cheap is expensive.
Building a home that will be “sitting” on your plot for the next 200 years requires a lot.
Therefore, we should not limit expenditure at the expense of the quality of the building.
It should not be too cheap or too expensive. Consultants can advise on this.
As you embark on your journey to build a new home, considering the above steps will help to see your efforts come out better than you thought or expected.
— The writer is a structural engineer.
