This Tip looks at how the Specification can protect you from excessive builder questioning.
Builders will have questions, no matter how good our documentation is. This normally is not a problem and we should have fees available for the odd builder questions that come our way.
It only becomes a problem when the questioning becomes excessive and results in an excessive drain of our time and fees.
If your documentation is sloppy, you are going to get (and probably deserve) more questions, but most of us work hard to have good documentation.
But sometimes, builders might get lazy or maybe are understaffed and instead of studying the documents, they just ask the designer. This is a problem, but one that the Specification can solve.
Up the front of the Preliminaries specify a hourly rate for remuneration of your time consumed by unnecessary questions that can be answered by looking at the documents.
Even if this clause is not enacted during construction, at the project end, when tidy-up of all the bits-n-pieces is happening, the accumulation of your hours answering unnecessary questions can be a great incentive to get your way with other prickly issues.
PROMOTIONAL NOTE: The ArchiAssist Specification resolves in a reasonable way, all the negative outcomes relating to the issues presented in this advisory.
To know more about ArchiAssist, you can download a FREE SAMPLE Specification from the website.
