back in mayish i took on a job that i planed out to be 8ish weeks to complete( 3 complete bathroom renos and a bunch of other tile work). I started back in the begining of june. but it turns out she had not got all the fixtures or even decided on them all. She has been nice enough to find a million other things for me to do but i have had a lot of half days or nothing to do days because of her in ability to get fixtures or make friggin decisions. i was nice enough to find other work for august while she had guests. from sept until now i have only had 19.5 days that i actually worked and thats with alot of standin around and watching the other trades for her. but last week she FINALLY made a decision on how the ensuite wood work is to look. i show up wed to check on the granite dudes, take measurements, pick up stock, pre paint so i can install on thurs and fri. i get there and she has changed her mind again and wants me to do profile samples. so i write off another day, make some samples for her to take on thurs. thurs i cant get ahold of her and fri she took off for the weekend. so now i have lost 3 more days work. would you charge them? would you tell them your charging them? if your a HO reading this, would you expect to be charged. she has been extremely nice and added alot of work but her ability to not make decisions is effecting me financially.
Tmaxxx
Urban Workshop Ltd
Vancouver B.C.
cheers. Ill buy.
Replies
Unless you both agreed to delay charges before the start of the job, you can't impose them. If you can convince her to pay them, more power to them.
The more important question is, how did you let yourself get into this situation? If you have customers like this, and who doesn't, you need to get other work to fill in the time. If you have other work you can do that and come back at your convenience. This puts you in the driver's seat.
Of course now you have scheduling problems, but that is for another thread.
What does your contract say? The time for asking this question and going over it with a client is before the fact. Noiw you have already accepted this condition and the only way to change it is to notify her in advance, even if your contract allows fo rit.
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That's too bad. It looks like this time you don't have much recourse. But you might do well to tell explain to her how it has affected you. She may think you happily go off to other jobs to fill the time while she is having one of her creative moments.
Having delays spelled out in any contract seems to concentrate client's minds wonderfully. The only problem I have heard of from the builder's perspective is that clients sometimes don't understand delays originating outside the builder's control.
I understand the contractor's view, however. . .
You say "Having delays spelled out in any contract seems to concentrate client's minds wonderfully. " Wonderful? Wonderfully? Or it causes a client to have warning bells and red lights flashing everywhere! Delays? What is a delay? Five minutes? A day? A week? When you say it is? A ten minute converstion in the hallway? Is it a delay if we change the color while teh contractor is busy framing anyway?
Good luck spelling that out in a contract. I would love to see how that is done.
Contractors hate change orders or they love them becasue they can't charge top-top dollar for them. A lot of customers know about the later and hate contractors for it. Like all businesses and things in life you have catch 22s.
My lawyer always says "The best contracts anticipate the demise of the contract" by which I think the tricky fellow means that the sequence of events when things go wrong should be spelled out as clearly as possible. I have included delay clauses in contracts especially when the owners wanted to do some of the work themselves. I have a friend who gives one price if the owner keeps out of the way, and a higher one if he helps out!
I still notice that everyone keeps preaching the contract but none offers actaul verbage. Hmm?
In its simplest form:
" The owner is required to make all necessary selections of materials and fixtures in a timely manner so as not to interfere with the contractor's schedule"
Appropriate penalties should then be spelled out.A good clause covering delays originating from the builder can be found in David Gerstel's "Running a Successful Construction Company" (A Fine Homebuilding book)You can also download sample contracts from the AIA all of which include quite detailed delay clauses. All of these should, of course, be run by your costly lawyer to provide him with Christmas money.
Since you reference sources of contract language I assume you don't have such clauses in your contracts. If you did you likely would have posted them instead of references. Interesting.
As for the "simplest form". If I were a home owner I would have laughed out load at it's vague, unquantifibility, or laughed silently and ignored it. Ask a judge what specifically that clause means I would guess . . . nothing. Timely? Ok, a contract is a summary of the meeting of minds spelled out. Timely, a month or so is timely to me. How about you? You say twenty minutes? Ok, timely. Contractor's schedule? Is that included in the contract too? If not how would the customer know whether it interfers or not? The contractor's say so?
Don't get me wrong, I get the jest and the necessite of protection, but he language is very vague. Many customers would be running to the hills on those words as nothing is defined.
I don't think its "interesting" that I didn't include copies of all my contracts. I was too lazy to type them all out for you. The one from Gerstel's book I have included pretty much verbatim in contracts, along with most of his other advice. I have also used the clause I quoted, and the terms "timely manner" and "contractors schedule" come from my lawyer not me. They are similar to "reasonable" which is often included by him. Terms which are vague, but that in his experience are favorably treated by the courts, which has behavioral expectations of both parties based on precedent.
Edited 11/14/2006 5:41 pm ET by fingersandtoes
Ok, whatever you say as long as we agree that a delay is anything longer than six months. obviusly the courts ahve defined a dlealy such. Right? No problem. To insist that the courts look favorably on such language is laughable. But whatever.
Define "timely manner" and "contractor's schedule".
In the event of delay, interference, disruption or inefficiency in the work caused by the client, the engineer (architect) or any consultants, or in the event the contractor claims that its operations were accelerated, resequenced, impacted, or made less efficient or more expensive, the contractor shall be entitled to an equitable extension of the contract time to cover delays in the critical path activities of the work, and shall be entitled to recover compensation or damages for actual increases in cost for site project personnel, project site equipment, project site labor and other miscellaneous general condition expenses at the project site directly caused by the delay.
FREE SPONGE BOB,SANCHO PANTS!
Now see, that stuff comes from the "Land of Contractors Only", that's where the contract is so one sided that there is probably a clause in there that states all excess material is the property of the contractor. I've seen that kind of stuff included in contracts. You how the contractor was able to build such a nice home for himself.
You know, if you're bold enough to put in clauses for delays, you should be bold enough to include penalties on the contractor caused delays also. Define all types of delays and be fair to all parties involved in the contract. Not just one.
Fair to the Client? Now you are going too far! Seriously though, you are quite right about penalties for delays caused by the contractor. The thread started with a specific problem faced by a builder, and consequently my replies have been dealing with his situation. But I am sure you could fill a thread with horror stories of contractors who start a job and then disappear costing the client time and money.
Before you accuse me of being too heavily on the contractor's side - I did practice architecture for years before I started general contracting. I've seen contractual disputes from both perspectives.
How is that unfair?
It deals with delays outside of the contractors control....which is what this thread was dealing with.A good contractor covers his arse as best he can....cause lawd knows....they're quite often left holding the short end of the stick.
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Just who in the world do you think the materilas belong to anyways? The Moon Godess?If I am working on a bid, My obligation is to do the job described, whether it takes me 200 2x4s or 240 of them. If I am careful and efficient and the customer recieves the structure they paid for and there are extra stuids left to return for credit, they belong to me. I ordered extra in the first place to be sure I had enough so the job flow would not be slowed and so I could cull the 10% un-useable ones.
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Now don't get your panties in a knot.
I first want to apologize to those contractors out there who somehow thought I was labeling all contractors as unscrupulous, thinking of their own pocket, and pulling fast ones over the clients that don't see a truck coming until they read the rear plates after they get run over. That would be unfair.
But let me tell you of my neighbor's best friend who was building an 900 SF second floor addition and had the home owner pay for enough TJIs, Hardiplank and shingle roofing for an 1800 SF addition. That's just for starters. If there is a way to cheat unsuspecting homeowners, the vultures will grab as much as they can.
That's a large stretch from retaining excess materials to fraudenlently overordering on someone else's dime.
Beer was created so carpenters wouldn't rule the world.
Just as an FYI, in the commercial and larger scale residential world they use "mobilization fees" to deal with construction delays. These mobilization delay fees are spelled out in contracts. For example, on a sitework contract a grading contractor gave me a mobilization fee included in his bid of ~$3000 on a ~$50k job with an additional $1500 fee for each return trip. Pretty good incentive to have one's "stuff" together when you make the call that the job is ready.
Now you have so logical details.
?
Good example of how a contract works.
One thing that seems to be getting lost in the discussion about the enforceability of contract language is the idea that the main benefit of a contract is to avoid disputes by delineating the responsibilities of all the parties.
If the parties understand that there are consequences for delays, change orders, poor workmanship, late payment or any other deviation from the contract, they are more likely to follow the spirit of the contract and there will be fewer problems for everybody. If there is a dispute that finds its way to court, the language of the contract is one small part of a much bigger problem. The inclusion of delay language in the contract at least communicates the parties' concern for a potential problem and the effort to be clear about it at the outset usually all that is necessary to avoid it being a problem later on.
A little quick on the trigger Piffin! Do you know whether the poster is refering to a cost plus contrat? DO you KNOW? In which case who does the material belong too?
it looked to me like Joe wwas the one a little quick on the trigger, indicting any contractor who removes left over materials as a thief. He has since corrected and recanted, so all is fine,I suppose. It does depend whether it is a cost plus or a firm price deal, but the context of the way he said it and the fact that most archies will not deal with cost plus is what led me to my reply.
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Et al,
On the one hand it is no surprise that this board has people only thinking from the view of the contractor. Not surprising. Then again, one would think that a contractor, arrogance check at the door, could at least see it from the customers perspective.
Believe me, I know people are but-holes. That would be customers, and excuse me, contractors as well. So one must protect against the other. But, at least start with assuming everyone is reasonable, protet yourself against those that are not, but at least try to see how the other half might view something.
I don't know what to say. As an architect I oversaw literally dozens of contracts, for both residential and commercial projects, all of which included clauses spelling out the obligations of BOTH sides in the event of delays. I guess they were all unenforceable.
Who said anything of the kind? What is wrong with people?
I just think the vague verbage offered here so far would be pretty tough to enforce.
DO you actually think teh words offered so far are good? Read them again. They say delays. They say nothing more. DO you disagree? So what is a delay? A minute, a day, a week, a month. And then the cavate, "... which interfers wiht the contractors schedule? What schedule? Is it in the verbage? Not the verbage offered so far.
So why doesn't anyone post the bullet proof verbage? Why did you not post some? YOu claim to have seen "literally dozens". Hmm? Really?
I mean people ask for ideas, advice, and assistence here and get smoke blown up...
"bullet proof verbage"?
What the hell are you talking about?
If there was such thing as "bullet proof verbage", there would be no need for lawyers.....or judges for that matter.
He came here for advice...he got it.
What did you come here looking for? Someone to write your contract for you?
FREE SPONGE BOB,SANCHO PANTS!
Seems to me he just came to find a fight. Let's introduce him to CU in the Tavern
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
>> "bullet proof verbage"?
What the hell are you talking about? <<
I've seen some pretty weak documents produced by attorneys. The kind, that when you really sit down and read it, it quickly becomes evident that it is pretty much unenforceable, and responsibility of involved parties is not clearly spelled out at all.
All: regarding my above statement, I am constantly reminded that lack of quality of workmanship and mistakes happen in every profession.
Another related thought: I went to the doctor the other day. He asked me what I do for a living (Construction Superintendent). Then starts telling me all about some of the F-ups that occurred when his friend had what sounded like an expensive custom house built. I thought 1 or 2 of his examples were suspect, at best. I declined to debate, because I was more interested in receiving quality health care... But I thought, Hmmm - expensive custom house - probably 8 months to build. I wonder if our friend the doc has made any mistakes in the last 8 months... I think we all know the answer to that... the only Q is how big the mistakes were and who knew the mistakes happened... :-)
OR - ever seen any computer programs with a bug in them? :-) "But there were deadlines to meet and budgets to keep". Like I said of quality of workmanship and mistakes happen in every profession. Oh yea - I forgot: fine home building isn't plagued by pesky things like budgets and schedules... ;-)
Sorry, that's twice that you have implied that I am a liar. I really don't see much point in continuing this.
DoRight doesn't seem capapble of Doing Right
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
There is no such thing as a bulletproof contract.The purpose of a contract is to identify and communicate details before they are needed, not to decide who wins once a lawsuit is entered.Once a suit is commenced, bioth side usually lose
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I tell homeowners that when everything is there to let me know and then I will give them a time slot when I will do the work. That way I am not waiting on them.
Charge for delays?
I do now. Just winding up a job that was sposed to take one week. In and out. Been 3 months.
Custom shower tray was ordered wrong.....4 weeks to get that fixed. Tiler had to go in then......glass screen 'wasnt what she wants' ( despite that being what she bought ) ....nother week to be told she would live with it.
Meanwhile I wait....pay everyone, materials etc.
Had another at the same time.....wait while they choose stuff they said they had, tile had to come from Mars or somewhere.....etc etc.
Now I have a 'delay' clause in the contract. If I have to wait....I charge.
If I have to run all over town sorting out the problem....I charge.
If I have to do extra work cos of their problem.....I charge.
Bottom line is.....I will no longer use up my money cos they cant organise thier life. I will however wait forever if they pay me to do so. Things will move a lot faster from now on I think.
Not an exponent of the DILLIGAF system.
AJ
how do you charge for waiting? If the job was in/out 1 week thing. Takes a month. Do you charge for 3 weeks of work?
What is your "damages"?
Not trying to stir anything but curious as to how you figure it
Exactly, how do you figure it and how to you explain that in a contract?
On this particular job I spent considerable time going back and forth to do some work, only to find I couldnt.
That I would charge for.
I went and did other things while the mess got sorted, but when moving another up the list involves 5 or 6 subs to co-ordinate things dont happen well at short notice.
Any time 'lost' while I arranged other things etc I would charge for. It wouldnt run to 3 weeks worth for example, but they certainly would get charged for the day where the problem showed up and at least another full one I use to arrange other jobs.
'Damages'......not sure what you mean.......however any time I do charge for will be at normal hourly. If as in this case the tiler goes out and finds not enough tile.....charge for that too.
If they want me to make calls and pick up parts I will.......for a fee. I used to do it for nothing thinking that it is faster and less costly for me to get it sorted NOW and keep the job moving. This latest one showed it isnt.
The contract just states that delays due to missing or defective items will be charged for.
The return of goods etc can be very time consuming so that will be charged for.
The contract is more of a 'I am really not kidding' sort of thing. Make the customer aware that the sloppy BS that some pull wont be tolerated with MY money/time.
I tell them to pay particular attention to that clause in the contract as well. There can be no excuses for not being aware of it.
If I can arrange 6 subs to arrive on time in a one week window, I am certain they can take the time to choose the stuff THEY want and have it delivered.
Something had to change, been caught out too many times. This latest one was a stuff up via the bathroom supplies outfit. Nothing to do with me but I wore the worst of it. If I charge the customer, they naturally wont be happy. If they go into the supplies place and tear a chunk out of them I expect things to move faster. A month for a shower fix is at least 3 weeks too much.
Maybe after having to pacify an irate customer or two they would pick up their game.....maybe. Nothing else I have tried worked.
Not an exponent of the DILLIGAF system.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
I have gotten into the habit of "overbooking" myself to a degree. Unless I am on a large project that will require my full attention for its entirety, I line up smaller projects as "fill-ins" with clients who are in no hurry.
I'm honest and upfront. I let them know that I'm in the midst of other projects, but that I'll likely be freed up from time to time, and that I'd be willing to take on their project(s) as time allows.
Most often folks are more than happy to accept such an indefinite completion date. Especially after I explain that if they need a more definitive timeframe, they'll have to wait a good six months before I can set aside "X" amount of days to commit solely to their project.
FREE SPONGE BOB,SANCHO PANTS!
So.,,,if your scheduled job gets back on track, then the fill-in project client is waiting?Does your fill-in client get any benefit (credit, discount, box of donouts) for waiting for you to come back and finish the project?
Does your fill-in client get any benefit....?
The benefit was not having to wait the (aprox.) 6 months to be attentioned.
These are small projects.....one day....two days...a week at the most. Very rare that I'm unable to complete them during the delay of the larger project.
Of course, I wouldn't schedule or begin a weeks long fill-in project if I'm only expecting to be delayed a day or two.
Conversely....If I am unexpectedly delayed for greater amounts of time, the larger projects will now have to wait for my schedule to permit my return.
Time is money....and delays are to be expected with any large scale project. I shouldn't be expected to sit around waiting for a phone call to return, however.
FREE SPONGE BOB,SANCHO PANTS!
i'm a homeowner.....and yup! i would expect to be charged, especially if i didn't follow a schedule you set for the completion because i couldn't make up my mind.
but i might be a little more informed than most, and i assume you told them they had to make decisions by "such and such time"
right?
tmaxxx,
I agree with other posters about having something in writing regading delays prior to the problem. My advise may not help now, but may be valuable in the future.
I furnish a Selection Sheet that is an effective prod for selections. It details all selections, sights a schedule for when the selection is to be complete, list the allowance avaliable for the selection, refers the HO to websites and brick and mortor stores / showrooms for selections, provides the names and numbers of the subs doing the installation for questions while refering to us for final approval and pricing of items, provides a list of light fixtures, applianes and plumbing fixtures, ect needed (ie. Ceiling Fixture Bedroom 4 / Lavatory Faucet Bath 3) and encourages promt adherance to the schedule to prevent delays.
Aside from this, I do not wait until I need the selection to ask questions and prod the HO. I send out emails and/or make phone calls to the HO reminding them of the upcoming need for a certain selection. This system has worked well. In some cases when I feel the HO may be starting to cause delays I get on the phone or email and encourage, offer help and give them additional referrences to websites, product lines, showrooms, ect. I push, but with diplomacy.
Websites such as the ones listed below have worked well to speed up the process:
http://www.build.com / http://www.moen.com / http://www.eldoradostone.com I just used http://www.eldoradostone.com for a cultured stone selction. The HO made two selections over the weekend and my sales rep is furnishing samples later this week.
Homebuilding....I love it.
Pushing with diplomacy, I encourage that concept.