The Paperwork Family

Mark Harris from Stroud Homes talks about the types of paperwork involved in building a new home – concept plans, quotes, working drawings, contracts and specs.

Video Transcript

Kia ora. I’m Mark Harris from Stroud Homes. I’d like to talk to you today about the paperwork involved in building a new home. Now, buying a new home, or having a new home built is a different experience from buying almost any other product you’re going to buy in your whole life, such as like a new car. You’re actually helping to create the product from the ground up depending on the level of customisation. So, you do have to have an expectation that it’s going to have a certain amount of challenge in them.

Our customers often ask us questions like, “How does the contract differ from the quote? What are the specifications? Why do some variations have a fee and others don’t?” We’d like you to understand that, so that’s what’s I’m going to go into here in this video.

To help you understand the whole paperwork process, I’d like to introduce you to what we call the paperwork family. Now, Grandpa and Grandma paperwork are a concept plan in the quote. So in each stage, there’s a drawing component and a text component, and we use these documents to communicate to you what we think that you want us to build for you. Once Grandpa and Grandma, the concept plan and the quote, are fairly well nailed down, we’ll get to a final drawing and a final quote.

We will now move to the parents.

Now, in the parents’ group is the working drawings, the draftsman fine-tuned drawings that we build a new home from, specifications which are a text-written form of what we’re going to build you, and overseeing this whole process is the contract. The contract is the rules and the regulations that the builder and the owner must follow during this building process. And, bear in mind that this is our standard contract, and only in very few exceptional circumstances will we vary the core terms of it.

So there’s three things in the parent stage, the working drawings, the contract, and the specifications. The next thing that come along in the process in the paperwork family is variations. Variations are like kids. So we’ve written the contract, it looks pretty good, but then you decide that you want to change something. We use a variation document to do that. It’s like a mini contract that has some terms and conditions, a description of what we’re going to do, and costs associated with them.

And that’s it. That’s the paperwork family.