Building a home should be one of the more enjoyable years of your life. It rarely is — and almost always for reasons that could have been prevented at the beginning.
What follows is the actual sequence we run, in the actual order, with the decisions you will be asked to make at each point. We publish it because the single greatest source of anxiety in custom building is not knowing what happens next.
We sit down — at our studio, on your land, or at your kitchen table — and talk about how you want to live rather than how many square feet you want. We will ask about mornings, about guests, about the pieces of furniture you refuse to part with.
Before a single line is drawn we establish what the land will allow. Setbacks, height limits, flood elevation, soil, tree survey, utility runs, HOA and ARB constraints. If you have not yet bought the lot, this is where we are most valuable.
We sit alongside your architect and designer from the first concept — not after drawings are complete. Constructability, cost and schedule are resolved on paper, where changes are inexpensive. This is the stage that determines whether the rest goes well.
In our Jupiter studio, in daylight, with full slabs and full-size samples rather than two-inch chips. We front-load selections deliberately so that long-lead items are ordered before they can hold up the schedule.
The least glamorous stage and the one that most often derails a schedule. We manage every submission and every review cycle ourselves, and we tell you the truth about timing rather than the number you would prefer to hear.
Your superintendent is on site daily and carries no more than two homes. You receive a written report every week with progress photography, the two-week look-ahead, any open decisions and a live cost-to-complete. No news is never good news on our jobs.
We complete the punch list before you move in, not after. You are walked through every system by the people who installed it, and we return at thirty days, six months and one year — whether or not you have called us.
The most common complaint about builders is not cost or quality. It is silence — the fortnight where nobody rings, and you cannot tell whether the delay is a supplier or a problem.
Every Harbor Point client receives a written report every Friday for the entire build. Progress against schedule, photography from the week, decisions we need from you, and the current cost-to-complete against the contract sum. Many of our clients are out of state for the majority of construction, and it has never been a problem.
We were in Connecticut for eleven of the fourteen months. The Friday report meant we always knew exactly where we stood. We never once felt out of the loop.
J. & A. Marchetti · Frenchman’s Creek
No cost, no obligation, no presentation deck. Just an unhurried discussion about what you have in mind and whether we are the right people to build it.