Tips for engaging other consultants when building a house...

When it comes to designing a house, the most obvious specialist to consult is the architect.
As omnipotent as an architect is, however, there are some things that even they cannot do. This is where you will need to engage the services of other specialist consultants. Depending on your project, this could include a geotechnical engineer (for soil and site evaluation), a waste-water management engineer (if you aren't connected to mains sewerage), or a structural engineer (for designing the footings).
For our project, we engaged the geotechical engineer directly (because we had soil tests performed before we found an architect), but for the other consultants, our architect recommended firms or practitioners with whom he had worked before.
Now this will sound pretty obvious... but if you engage any specialist consultant, you should also get a quote and be clear on what you require before they do the work.
Not rocket science, you might think.
But when you are swept up in having to get things done within a particular time frame, and especially when communication is happening between you and the consultant via a third party (ie your architect) it is doubly, no triply, important to make sure you know what you are agreeing to, and how much it is going to cost.
If you have been following our journey, you would be aware of our ongoing driveway saga, as we try to reconcile the need to meet certain legislative requirements with the fact that our (increasingly expensive) driveway is going to be way more engineered that the actual access road to our property itself.
You would also know that we submitted the Development Application to Huon Valley Council on 20th September, and that part of that application included said monolithic driveway designs.
Now we had already agreed for the engineer to perform work on the driveway designs, and had agreed to an estimated cost of around $1,000. However, when the bill arrived ... it was in excess of $7,000.
Yes, you read that correctly. $7,000.
The engineer had to redraw some plans to satisfy the Development Application but didn't advise us that an additional charge would be involved and/or seek our approval for that additional charge. So our delay in updating this blog has been because we have been trying to sort out the account as amicably as possible with the engineer.
The long version of the story is that it caused us a lot of stress, involved the Department of Fair Trading, and at one stage had the engineer threatening to withdraw the designs from Council.
(Oh, and it turned out that we had already paid a significant portion of the $7,000... for which they were attempting to charge us a second time).
The short version is that it is now sorted, without us having to resort to medication to maintain our sanity.

TIP: Even if you have a quote, always check what is excluded. And if there is more work to be done, always check that this will be included in the quote.

V&A