Articles | SDS Design

Leaky Buildings - Home Owners By: , Tuesday 13 April 2010

We don't doubt for a moment that there are large amount of people, who have ended up with a problem house through absolutely no fault of their own and this is really unfortunate. There is also another side to this story. Many people feel they can just organise a builder on a "Labour Only" basis and arrange all the sub trades and building material themselves. The builder is a sub contractor, like all the rest and the owner is now in fact the main contractor and/or the Project Manager.

A Project Manager is a person who is proficient in Building Construction Organisation, and usually can quantify a job. An owner does not fall into this category.

Many owners, have directed their own home, through a total lack of experience, into disarray. In the end, they realise they have created a leaky mess, and on-sell the property as quickly as possible.

While we talk our clients around to using a professional Building Company, after hearing their intentions of organising the project themselves, many of them ignore our advice and sometimes take exception to it if they feel we may have inferred that they couldn't possibly run the job properly.

Where this situation occurs, the owner is ultimately responsible, and usually, all the materials and sub contractors are chosen due to lower cost than other competitors.

I am very passionate about our industry - I eat, sleep and breathe Architectural Design, as my piers well know. That is why I feel it is an absolute tragedy that a whole industry is being undermined by Policies, unskilled people, ruthless contractors and sales people chasing the al- mighty dollar. In my view, these activities are no different to any other fraudulent crimes happening every day across the country. All of these people have no real understanding of what the industry is about, yet they are pivotal in its demise.

We also see many bad plans, where they aren't working or have blown the budget, requiring fixing or downsizing. We see as many as around 10 - 15 per year in recent times - and we are only a small practice.

Chemical free framing, while we probably all agree is not ideal, is in fact not the main issue, however it does exacerbate the problems.

In closing, I will read to you an Editorial which I wrote with a small amount of input by a close friend and colleague, which was intended for the MBA Magazine "building Today", which was a tongue in cheek poke at the Building industry, but the Editor didn't want to print it because he felt it may be too controversial.

Click here for a pdf of the entire article

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