How a Team Mentality Benefits Your Project

(Part 1- Contractors + Consultants)

This is where it might start to sound very Utopian, but if you stick with me, you’ll see why a team environment gives you a better project and a better process (which is the biggest asset of all). Any beautiful end product can be tarnished by a bad experience getting it accomplished.

Here at Sanura Design and around the company we keep in the design community, Team is the word. The best projects have everyone involved from the beginning.

“But, Melissa” I hear you ask “I watch a lot of HGTV and love Pinterest and everyone I know just hires a contractor for their project, who gives a price and gets the work done.” That is certainly one way to approach things. That sort of process is 1st of all unfair to the contractor- what on earth is he/she pricing anyway? You have no design in place, they have no idea what the finishes are, and if you have a more extensive renovation happening, they don’t even know what all the work will entail.

Well, when I put it that way, it’s seems a bit silly to ask them to price it out without a design. But the alternative is a bit silly as well.

Let’s say you really want an accessible spa bathroom. We come up with a bright, warm material palette that’s classic and we pull together some fancy renderings to present the design. The presentation above is beautiful and everyone is incredibly excited to move forward. But wait, no one involved the contractor in the process, so we find out that we just doubled our original budget with the complex tile layouts and the sheer amount of tiling in the bathroom. But you just fell in love with that design- that is where heartbreak happens in the process and you would be justified in losing trust in your designer.

That is why its important that our contractor or builder is involved in our process from the beginning. We run ideas by them first to see how it will impact the budget- and make sure our ideas are practical. You see that beautiful arch above the tub? Maybe that’s going to costs us thousands of dollars due to the complexity of the construction/difficulty tiling the surface and a regular arched top would save us those thousands and still be in keeping with the design- a great relationship with our contractor means we find these things out before we present the design to you.

They are also our partners in coming up with solutions. We work with professionals that first ask “how do we solve this?” and work with us to come up with solutions.

This is an invaluable attitude during the design phase- and it makes for a much better construction process. Because I’ve included the contractor throughout the process he/she already knows the design- and are able to make suggestions to make the construction process smoother. On our part, doing the design before you start doing any construction means the contractor already has a full set of instructions (including all those materials and fixtures) so that a smooth construction timeline can be planned- and the budget can be finalized before any work starts.

It’s much easier to massage the budget (as we’ve mentioned before, we love “high/low”ing projects, and we can creatively make things looks amazing while saving budget in smart areas) before anything has been started or materials/fixtures have been special ordered (and can’t be returned). Also- it makes it much easier for the contractor to stick to the budget everyone agreed on.

This also goes for other consultants. We mentioned that was an accessible spa bathroom- maybe you have complex health issues. That is when we bring in a consultant like an Occupational Therapist, who works with us to ensure the solutions and overall design enables you to move forward with a full life and incorporates any limitations and goals you have. Having a consultant on the team from the beginning and through-out the process means even after they do a customized assessment and we all get a detailed report, we can still count on them to assist in designing custom solutions. This is how we ensure things are designed specifically for you and your needs through-out your project.

So, Go Team! (In part 2 later this year, we’ll be discussing how Sanura Design’s tight-knit design team means better projects)