General Contracting Services

Expert Residential General Contracting

Northern Virginia, Washington DC, and Montgomery County, Maryland

1) If Your Plans are Completed

If your project’s plans are already prepared, as your general contractor, we will review them and provide you a cost proposal.

But we will do more. If we see something your architect specified and if we know of other options that may serve you better, we will suggest them.

Some examples:

• Your architect may have specified a particular brand of siding for an addition. We may know another brand that is essentially the same or better and is no more expensive or less expensive.
• We may be able to suggest alternative options for things like lighting, windows, flooring, cabinets, and the like that will work as well, look as good, and may save you money.
• We may know that homeowners have had problems with something your architect suggested or specified, and we can suggest alternatives to you and your architect.

2) If Your Plans Haven’t Even Started (The recommended approach)

As your general contractor, Metro can provide you the most benefit if we work with you and your architect from the very start of the design process. The benefits we can provide you by working with your architect from the beginning of your project include:

• We will better understand what you are planning to do and why. This allows us to offer recommendations, alternative solutions, and options to you and your architect along the way, based on our years of remodeling and building projects.
• Architects aren’t usually that familiar with current construction, product, and building material costs. Therefore, they tend to underestimate the likely cost of projects. And, sometimes, they underestimate a project’s real cost by a fair amount. This can lead to problems.
• As your project is being designed, we can provide you and your architect with cost and other feedback at various stages of the project. This feedback can even be early in the process and include the likely cost of what is being planned. This helps prevent you from having your project fully designed and specified only to find out it far exceeds your budget or desired cost range. All too often, we find that this is the case.
• Whenever MBRG (or any contractor for that matter) isn’t involved with a project from the beginning and isn’t providing cost input as the design progresses, architects tend to create plans based mostly on what their client desires and what they respond to positively when seeing the architect’s ideas.
• We can provide general estimates of cost as the project begins, and during its early stages. Once the plans are firmed up enough, but not fully completed, and with your input, such as for expected product selections, we can provide you a tighter estimate, so you and your architect will know if the project is on target with your budget. Metro and our designers can also help you with product and materials selections while the refinement of your plans continues. This selection and costing process will provide you with two additional benefits.

1. 1. Product, material, and finish selections impact the total cost of your project. With kitchen and bathrooms, these costs can be a significant portion of the project’s end cost. So even if your architect designs a project that structurally comes in within your budget, unless you also know these non-structural costs, your project can still go over.
   2. By starting product, material, and finish selections while your architect is working on the structural plans, you can shorten the time your project takes from start to finish as well as know the realistic cost of the project, not just the structural elements.