Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Owner’s “Front End” Documents: We frequently are called upon to assist our architect clients in integrating owner-furnished bidding and contracting documents and Division 01 General Requirements documents into their project manuals. These range in quality from well-thought-out to, well, not so good. The challenging ones are non-standard General Conditions documents, which sometimes contain clauses that conflict with their own General Requirements.
We have spent a lot of time devoted to these documents over the years and do our best to help. This can be an extremely time-consuming task, as these documents are often presided over by facility staff unfamiliar with the “how we do things” of the construction industry. Once in a while, the client asks us to update or produce a new set of master documents for their use. It is challenging but satisfying work as we need to integrate specific staff concerns and experience, but the end result hopefully reduces claims and disputes and general wear and tear on everyone involved in their construction projects.
Friday, November 13, 2020
Security Glazing: We, our architect clients, and their school clients are learning a lot about security glazing this year in response to deep concerns about safety in our schools. Schools are asking security consultants and their local law enforcement agencies for recommendations on hardening building perimeters and classroom entrances. The building product industry is responding with security glazing units targeted at this concern, along with multiple approaches for classroom door openings. Most of the security glazing units have been around for decades in the detention, DoD, and VA facility markets. The challenge to the facility owners is committing to what level of security is adequate, and where is the budget for this work, and will it provide the enhanced security that they are seeking?
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Just as I Thought: We have had 4 delayed architect projects come back alive this week. We are past the election. Confidence is building in a long term solution to Covid. Or maybe owners are getting tired of waiting for what they need. Delighted to be working on a multi-use development, a Boys and Girls Club, a municipal pool facility renovation, and a handful of K12 projects. Plus several interesting new building product manufacturer guide specification projects. So December and the first quarter of 2021 are going to be full tilt at SpecGuy.
Monday, November 2, 2020
Trusted Teams: We are accustomed to writing contracting requirements and specifications on publicly bid projects where requirements must be hard and fast, and all work completely documented, and third party inspected. It is a particular pleasure to work on the other type of project: an experienced negotiated team of long-standing operating largely out of trust on private projects. We do not have to specify pre-installation meeting agendas and mountains of documentation, as the constructor is highly experienced and gets the top quality people in their marketplace to complete the excellent designs well documented by our architect clients. If something is not quite right, it gets fixed. They “build them like they used to.”