You Can’t Always Get What You Want

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Moral: You don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect. (Or, you don’t get what you specify, you get what you observe.)

Situation

In the preparation of Construction Documents, we spend a great deal of time determining the proper components for the building systems. We apply a great deal effort writing specifications and making drawings and cross checking between them.

Mistake

Rather than giving consideration to the perfect set of Construction Documents, we often overlook who will use them and how they will interpret them.

For example, for our roofing projects it is not uncommon for the foreman to have all of his instructions about how to assemble the roof system on a single 3 by 5 note card. He carries this card in his pocket.

All of the wonderful specification writing and drafting work in the Construction Documents is reduced to a single 3 by 5 note card!

Result

Some times the construction crew assembles their portion of the work by habit or “area practice”, rather than what was so carefully researched and specified.

Maybe they cannot do their work the way it was specified because of interference with other work. Maybe they were told to do their work at the wrong time in the construction sequence. Maybe the wrong materials were delivered to the project site.

The result will be a building not in conformance with the Construction Documents.

Lesson learned.

There is no substitute for timely jobsite visits. This means being at the place of work at the correct time.

For example, the roof is one of the largest field-assembled systems in a building. It is typically the assembly of multiple components. Looking at the finished roof does not show which components were used or how they were installed. For that, the Owner’s representative needs to be on the roof as it is being assembled.

Some clients forgo the expense of roof warranty premiums and use the saving to pay for a roof construction observer instead.