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Building or Adding Contract Pitfalls and Cautious continued
By arlene | November 19, 2008
Architect
When it comes to designing a house, use an architect, regardless of how confident you may be in your own design abilities and taste. They are qualified to assist even the most creative and imaginative of people to realize and probably improve on their ideas while providing an insight into what is possible at what price.
For drawing up plans and supervising construction, the fee for an architect registered with one of the provincial institutes — bodies safeguarding standards in the profession — is set by institute tariffs at a minimum of 6 percent of the cost of the building. Should you just want the sketch plans of the house, the fee is 1,2 percent of the cost, while additional working drawings will take the total to 2,4 percent. The fee for supervision alone is 1,5 percent. Working drawings plus organizing tenders for the job and calculating quantities will cost 4,5 percent of the building cost. If an architect is commissioned to select furniture, fittings, carpets and other subjective elements beyond the finish stage, you can expect to pay about 12 percent of the cost of the items, or alternatively you may come to an agreement to pay the architect for the time he spends on this task, currently at least R35 an hour.
Plans
Basically, you will need approval from your municipal authority for any construction of new buildings, alterations to existing buildings, be they internal or external, garages, carports, toolsheds, pergolas, verandas, swimming pools, some walls and even signs, aerials and TV antennae in many areas.
Try to get away without a plan for something requiring a plan and you will almost certainly be caught. At present, the consequences of doing first and applying second are not all that serious, and while one can not advocate ignoring the regulations, it is a fact that they are not stringently enforced. But why leave yourself liable to fines, threats going as far as notification of demolition proceedings, and possible infringements of regulations that could cause new work to be undone when all this can be avoided by simply submitting plans in the normal fashion?
Never be afraid of putting too much information on a plan. Omissions inevitably lead to the plan being rejected at some stage of the checking process and since the rejected plan is usually returned by post and the whole process has to begin from scratch when it is resubmitted, it is a good idea to check first with the building branch in an attempt to get as much right as possible from the beginning. Once the working plans for a new house have been completed, the building society providing the bond finance should be approached with a copy plus either several tenders from builders or the owner’s or architect’s compilation of quantities and building costs. As a rule of thumb, your labour and material costs should be in a ratio around 40:60 for the standard finish home in South Africa. Copies of the plans should also go to the building section of the relevant local authority for approval at this stage. Depending on the state of the business cycle and the manpower position in the plans department, along with the complexity of the project, you can expect a wait of anything from a few weeks to several months for the plans to be passed, assuming they do not require amendments.
The City Council of Cape Town and other authrities have pro- vided guides to building plans approval and the control of devel- opment. These go a long way towards removing some of the uncertainty over just what is involved in these processes and a visit to the plans sections you will be dealing with is likely to convince you that there are helpful people there. If you have engaged an architect, you do not have to bother with this aspect.
Once your plans are passed, the building work can get under way, not before. The first inspection by your local authority’s building branch is usually one of the site itself and a good way to get off to a bad start with the inspector is to have already started work without the proper approval, which incidentally will demand adequate toilet facilities for workers on site. A passed plan will usually contain tickets to be submitted to the building branch requesting inspection of various stages as they are ready. The stages typically include inspection of the site, foundation trenches, foundations, proper sewage trenches and completion tickets for the sewerage and the building.
Delays
Make careful provision for the delay in plans being passed as this is a somewhat frustrating hiatus in the building process. For the anxious new home-owner who is renting premises and has to give the landlord reasonable notice, or for one who is selling and is trying to time the transaction to fit in with completion of the new home, this delay (which is by no means the only one likely to be encountered) can prove a costly inconvenience. It is always wise to err on the conservative side when estimating project completion times. The consequences of overlooking a three month delay instead of two, for example, in getting the house plans passed, or having to hold up construction for months because of a shortage of bricks are the kind of accidents that are almost certainties. Miscalculate the amount of time you will require in your existing premises because of these delays and you could find yourself having to hastily arrange new accommodation at the last minute and this could prove quite expensive. It could also mean having to make two moves instead of one, with all the implications this has for fragile and even fairly rugged household effects, to say nothing of moving charges.
A time clause with a hefty cash penalty for late completion is a must in every building contract. Without it you can almost expect your project to take a back seat to others who have wisely insisted on insertion of the clause.
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Topics: Contract, Department, Job, Rental, South Africa | 5 Comments »
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