A 7,000 square foot Santa Monica home, finished through the 2020 shutdown

What it is

A 7,000 square foot custom home for a private homeowner in Santa Monica, under contract to Tellus Design and Build and mid-build when California's stay-home order landed in March 2020. Fowler had been running Tellus since 2004, and it was not an unusual job for the firm.

Construction was listed as essential the same week, so the site could legally stay open. The subcontractor crews the schedule depended on stopped confirming dates anyway. Nobody refused; people weighing sick parents, closed schools and their own risk simply stayed home, and a schedule written in January stopped being true.

What Common Ground did

• Fowler set the legal question aside and planned around the physical one: whether the crews would actually come.
• Before every phase he confirmed the crew with the subcontractor directly, by name and date, instead of reading a schedule written before the shutdown.
• He sorted every open phase by its scarce input: a license (structural framing, rough mechanical, electrical and plumbing) or a skill (finish carpentry, trim, hardware, fixtures and coordination).
• Licensed phases ran as early as a confirmed crew allowed, with buffer behind them and a second subcontractor kept warm on each licensed trade.
• For months Fowler did the skill-bound finish work himself and pulled coordination, inspections and owner communication under one person, so fewer people had to be available for the job to keep moving.
• He tracked his own hours against each phase's original budgeted value, so the job's accounting still showed the work performed.
• The owner's schedule was never reopened. The disruption was carried inside the contractor's plan, not passed to the homeowner.

Results

• The 7,000 square foot house was finished and the contract was never reopened: the owner was never asked to renegotiate a date or a dollar during a year when many owners were asked for both.
• The cost was carried by the contractor, not the owner: months of the chief executive's hours on one house instead of on the pipeline, booked against each phase so the accounting still told the truth.
• The license-or-skill sort became a reusable instrument an owner, developer or contractor can run on the remaining scope whenever a crew goes quiet.

External links

• Public data room: Santa Monica House data room

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At a glance