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Subject
The custom home building process
How a custom home gets built in Colorado, phase by phase
In short
Building a custom home in Colorado runs through six phases: feasibility and budget, land, design, permitting, construction, and closeout. The phases overlap, and the two that most often break a schedule are permitting and long-lead material procurement.
Articles on this subject are being written and will appear here.
Six phases take a Colorado custom home from an idea to a certificate of occupancy. The two that most often break a schedule are the two nobody plans for.
The phases
Feasibility and budget. Before a parcel or an architect, establish what you can spend and what that buys in your target area. Construction lenders will tell you what they will underwrite, and that number is more useful than a wishlist.
Land. Selecting and acquiring a site that supports the home you want at a cost you have verified. Most of the irreversible decisions happen here.
Design. Architect, engineer, and builder producing a set that can be priced and permitted. Value engineering happens here or it happens painfully later.
Permitting. Submittal, review, corrections, resubmittal. This is one of the two phases that routinely runs long, and its duration varies by jurisdiction rather than by the quality of your drawings.
Construction. Foundation through finish. The other phase that runs long, usually because of long-lead procurement rather than labor.
Closeout. Final inspections, certificate of occupancy, punch list, warranty period.
Where schedules break
Permitting and procurement. Neither is under your builder’s control, and both are predictable enough to plan around if someone is paying attention.
Permitting duration is a property of the jurisdiction. Douglas County, Boulder County, and the City and County of Denver run different processes on different timelines, and a builder who works regularly in your jurisdiction can tell you what to expect more accurately than any published estimate.
Procurement is about identifying long-lead items early. Windows, certain appliances, and specialty materials can carry lead times that exceed the framing schedule. The failure mode is discovering in month four that something ordered in month three arrives in month nine.
What to fix before you start
The budget. Not the target, the actual number including a contingency you genuinely intend not to spend. Custom home budgets that assume no contingency are not budgets, they are hopes, and the overrun arrives during framing when your options are narrow.
Articles in this section cover each phase in detail.
References
Where writing in this subject rests on an outside authority, it is one of these.
Written and reviewed by Jason August, President and Employing Broker, Colorado license ER.040029060.·