Planning, Planning, Planning
You’ve had the discovery call.
Now there’s a stretch of calendar between that conversation and the day a truck shows up, with nothing visibly happening to your house.
How long is that part supposed to take?
And what are you paying for while nothing looks any different?
In this post, you’ll learn how long pre-construction runs, what fills those weeks on our side and on yours, what gets decided during design development, how permitting and code review get handled, and what you’re holding the day before demolition.
What Happens During the Pre-Construction Phase of a Remodel?
During pre-construction, Bunn & Sons Custom Builders develops the design, bids and deconflicts scopes across 20 to 25 trade partners, locks every material selection, coordinates code review and permits with your city or county, and builds the schedule.
The phase covers everything from your discovery call to the day you sign a fixed-price construction agreement, and it usually runs 2 to 4 months.
If your contractor doesn’t have a process similar to this, that’s a red flag.
The 4 Types of Pre-Construction Meetings We Go Through Together
1. Kickoff
You’ll meet your full project team at your house, about 1 or 2 weeks after the agreement is signed.
We complete a detailed digital site scan of the home.
Then we sit down for a Vision and Lifestyle Planning Session, which is where we get at how you actually live in the space rather than how the floor plan reads on paper.
You leave with homework.
Between now and the next meeting, you’re gathering inspiration for your material selections and sending it to your project manager and designer, because that’s what we build the first concept out of.
2. Concept Presentation
3 to 6 weeks later, we bring you a design direction.
Initial concepts, layouts, and the overall aesthetic, plus a review of the inspiration and preliminary selections you’ve been collecting.
Then we refine it together until it clicks, with each concept refinement round taking about 2 to 4 weeks.
Your first major selections land in this stage: appliances, cabinetry direction, fireplaces, and other major equipment.
Those 4 get decided early because everything downstream is sized around them.
3. Design Development
This is where the concept turns into something buildable, including:
- Detailed cabinetry and layout plans.
- Lighting and electrical design.
- Coordination with the specialty trades.
- Ongoing budget and schedule alignment.
- Completion of full construction documents.
- Permit submission.
Your job is to finalize everything that’s left, which is plumbing and lighting fixtures, flooring, tile, countertops, windows, doors, millwork, paint, and every specialty element in the project.
Each round runs about 3 to 6 weeks before we present you with the new design.
We’d rather run another round than start construction with an open question, which can stall your project after your home’s been demo’d.
4. Contracting and Construction Launch
Every detail is settled, so now we:
- Have you sign the contract.
- Hand you the fixed-price construction agreement.
- Order and procure your materials.
- Confirm the permit has been approved.
- Work out your construction start date.
- Schedule the trade partners.
On your end, you sign, make the commencement payment, and get your home and your calendar ready.
That’s the last of the paperwork.
All of it runs under a Project Development Agreement, a paid, legally binding planning phase with its own contract, separate from the build.
The next thing that happens at your house is demolition.
What Runs Alongside All Four Stages
People tend to call these the design weeks, but design is only one part.
Yes, we’re designing.
We’re also bidding and scoping the work with every trade partner on the job, and they work as part of the team to develop their own individual scopes, from demolition through final cleaning.
Then we mesh all of that together and deconflict it against the other 20 to 25 trade partners who’ll be on your project.
We’re also doing site visits and plan updates, plus whatever testing your project calls for:
- Hazardous-material testing.
- Land surveys.
- Soil tests.
- Energy-efficiency evaluations.
And iterative updates on your budget and your schedule every time you make a change.
You moved from option A to option B on the kitchen layout, so here’s what that did to the budget, and here’s what it did to the schedule.
We’re coordinating with your jurisdictional authority the whole time, your city or your county, and with your HOA if you’ve got one.
Getting that teed up is on us, not you, whether the house is in Broomfield or over in Boulder.
What’s on Your Plate During These Weeks
Clearing spaces out and moving furniture are the big tasks.
You’ll also be making arrangements for a short-term rental, and figuring out how you’re going to cook dinner for the next three and a half months without a kitchen.
We’ll make suggestions and point you in a direction if you need.
What Gets Decided During Design Development and Selections
In a word, everything.
Pre-construction is about eliminating allowances and assumptions, because we don’t want to leave any TBDs in a contract.
How a Selection Changes the Scope of Work
Selections drive scope and cost heavily, which is exactly why they get made now instead of in month 3 with a framer standing around waiting on you.
Do you want a 1-hole or a 3-hole sink in the countertop?
Large format tile, or small?
Those read like taste questions, but they’re also labor questions.
A 4-foot by 4-foot tile in a shower means the tile setter is bringing help, because nobody sets that alone. Little subway tiles, he can handle on his own.
Same room, same finish category, different number of guys on site for a different number of days.
Testing the Layout Before It Gets Built
We model the space in 2D and 3D, both as it exists today and as we’re proposing to build it.
Then we usually come back with 2 or 3 different looks at solving the same set of problems.
Each one carries a budget.
One concept might be roughly $300,000, and a more involved version of it $450,000 to $500,000, which makes the choice a lot clearer than a conversation about square footage.
Then we furnish it.
Your bed, your end table, your dresser, dropped into the model at real dimensions.
Now the plan can tell you something specific: with a king in that room, the walkway between your bed and your bathroom comes out to 3 feet instead of the 4 feet it was.
3 feet means nothing on a screen, so we’ll tape it out on the floor and let you walk it.
Then you might decide 4 feet is what you want. That’s a queen instead of a king, or a different dresser, or the whole arrangement turned 90 degrees.
How Code Review and Permitting Get Handled Up Front
We talk to your jurisdiction before we submit anything, rather than after they kick the application back.
In Colorado, every city or county is its own jurisdiction, and the rules vary from one to the next.
For example, Broomfield is a city and a county. It isn’t part of Boulder County, and what’s true in one has no bearing on the other.
So we find out which building codes your jurisdiction is in and whether they’ve got special requirements for the kind of project you’re doing, and we work that into the plan before the application goes in.
Structural review lands here too.
If we’re taking out a wall, an engineer is involved.
There isn’t a jurisdiction we work in that doesn’t require it, even for a 2-foot section anyone could tell you isn’t holding anything up.
Sometimes that’s a short letter confirming the wall isn’t load-bearing and you’re clear to remove it.
Sometimes it needs a beam and post structure, plus a trip down to the basement to pour concrete for a bearing point that doesn’t exist yet.
Either way, it’s resolved before the permit application, not during framing.
Why Paying for Planning Is What Makes Your Fixed Price Real
You pay for planning so that a missed detail is our problem instead of yours.
That’s the whole trade-off.
If you told us something during pre-construction and it didn’t make it into the contract, covering it is on us.
We can only make that offer because we were paid to do the work properly.
Pre-construction is about eliminating allowances and assumptions, and we don’t want a single TBD left in the contract.
At that point, the price isn’t a guess; it’s margin applied to real, known costs.
Here’s what happens when nobody pays for that.
You say you want white Shaker cabinetry.
The builder specs the cheapest white Shaker on the market, because a cheaper project is easier to sell than an expensive one.
Month 2, you find out it isn’t what you had in your head.
That’s the first change order. Then there’s another, and another, and so on.
The $95,000 project you signed off on 6 weeks ago costs $210,000 to get what you actually wanted.
So when you’re comparing bids, ask each builder who eats it if something was missed.
The answer tells you whether the number was planned or guessed.
Our featured projects show the payoff of planning.
[FLAG – Brain has no documented price, range, or percentage for the Project Development Agreement. Section states that pre-construction is a separately paid contract without saying what it costs, per the Client Brief sales process table. Confirm with client whether a figure can be published.]
What You Walk Away With Before the First Wall Comes Down
A signed fixed-price construction agreement, plus everything behind it:
- Full construction documents, including detailed cabinetry, layout, lighting, and electrical plans.
- An approved building permit.
- Every material and finish selection made and documented, down to the paint.
- A production schedule built in Gantt form around trade partners’ real availability, with buffer for weather, holidays, and if the unexpected should happen, like deliveries showing up wrong.
- Your construction start date, and the name of the superintendent who’ll be at your house.
You’ll also walk away with a list of what we can’t control, called the known unknowns, such as:
- City inspection timelines.
- Weather windows.
- A long-lead material on backorder.
- Whatever’s behind a wall in a 70-year-old house that nobody has opened since it went up.
We can’t make those disappear, so we name them now instead of introducing you to them in month 4.
What you won’t get is a jobsite that stalls.
It’s all planned and scheduled ahead of time, so once we mobilize onto your project anywhere on the Front Range, we’re there, Monday through Friday, with continuous progress almost every day.
No TBDs, No Guesswork, and No Surprises With Bunn & Sons Custom Builders
A long planning phase helps make sure all the decisions are made and that you’re happy with them.
That, and a dialed-in construction process using trusted trades, is how you end up with the home you’ve been needing.
If you’re thinking through a project and want to talk it over, fill out our contact form or give us a call today.
