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Plan · Utah County
Almost every dollar a project will cost is decided before anyone breaks ground. Danny Bird has been building since 2001. Bring him a site, a use, and a number, and find out what is actually buildable before you spend money on drawings.
Why this stage exists
By the time a project is in permit review, most of its cost is already locked. Where the building sits, how deep the utilities run, what the structure has to span, how the site drains. Those choices get made in the first few weeks and paid for over the next eighteen months.
Pre-construction is the stage where changing your mind is still free. It answers a short list of unglamorous questions: does this fit on this site, does it fit inside this number, and what has to be true for it to work.
The alternative is the common version. You commission a design, wait for it, price it, and discover the gap. Then you pay to redraw what you already paid to draw.
What pre-construction covers
Each one gates the next. There is no reason to coordinate a design for a project that the site will not support.
Can this site carry this project. Zoning and setbacks, slope and access, soils, utilities, easements, and what the city will and will not allow you to do here.
Turning an idea into a written description a builder can price. Size, structure, systems, and finish level, stated plainly enough that two people reading it picture the same building.
Architect, engineers, and consultants pointed at the same target. Structural, mechanical, and civil decisions reconciled on paper instead of in the field at framing.
Sequence, phasing, long lead items, permitting path, and the schedule logic underneath it. What has to be ordered early, and what has to happen before what.
Deliverables
What the lot or the existing building allows, what it costs to work around, and the conditions that will show up as change orders if nobody looks now.
The project described in enough detail that bids can be compared against each other instead of against guesses.
The order of magnitude, and which parts of the project are driving it. Detailed budgeting is its own stage. See budgeting and cost estimating.
Which jurisdiction reviews this, what they will ask for, and where the approval timeline sits inside the overall schedule.
The order of operations, the long lead items, and the decisions that have to be made before design can responsibly move forward.
Sometimes the honest answer is that this project does not work on this site at this budget. Hearing that early is the cheapest thing on this page.
Who this is for
You are under contract or thinking about it, and you want to know what it will really take to build here before the due diligence window closes.
You know the use, roughly the size, and roughly the number. You do not yet know whether those three things can coexist.
You want the design brief to start from something real, so the drawings you commission are drawings you can afford to build.
The drawings came back and the numbers did not work. Before redesigning, it is worth finding out which assumption actually broke.
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Questions
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Once the scope is real, the budget can be. Detailed budgets, cost analysis, and value engineering.
Independent expertise on your side of the table: plan review, bid evaluation, and oversight during construction.
Design, budgeting, permitting, engineering, and construction under one contract and one point of accountability.
When the planning is done and it is time to build, the person who priced it is the person who builds it.
Where we work
A lot you are thinking about, a use you have in mind, or a project that stalled. Bring it to Danny and get a straight read on it.
Or call or text (801) 735-7186