C 8.0
Nothing changes without a signed page
Every house changes while it is being built. What separates a manageable project from a disputed one is whether those changes were written down and signed before they happened.
A change order is a short document that alters the contract. Ours name what is changing, why, what it does to the price, what it does to the schedule, and it carries both signatures before the work happens.
The temptation to skip it is real and it always comes from a good place. You mention something at the site on a Tuesday, the superintendent agrees it is straightforward, and neither of you wants to turn a two-minute conversation into paperwork. So the wall moves and nothing is written.
Four months later, one of you remembers a figure and the other remembers a different one, and neither is lying. Human memory is simply not a contract. The paperwork exists to protect the relationship, not to formalise a lack of trust, and the households who end up most grateful for it are the ones who nearly waived it.
What is on the page
- What is changing
- Described specifically enough that somebody who was not at the conversation could build from it.
- Why
- Your request, a condition found on site, or a requirement from the reviewing authority.
- Effect on price
- The addition or the credit, itemised, not a lump figure with no working shown.
- Effect on schedule
- Days added, and whether it pushes a stage that other trades are booked around.
- Signatures
- Both, dated, before the work starts.
C 9.0 · Where they come from
Three sources, and only one of them is you
You asked for it. You saw the framed space and understood the room differently from how it read on paper, which happens on nearly every project and is a perfectly good reason to change something. These are the easiest to handle because everyone agrees on the origin. They are also the ones worth timing: the same request costs very little before rough-in and a great deal after drywall.
The site produced it. Rock at footing depth where the investigation did not show it. A utility that is not where the locate marked it. Buried debris from a structure nobody recorded. These are nobody's fault and the correct response is identical: work in that area stops, we call you the same day, you see what is there, and it is priced in writing before anything continues.
A reviewing authority required it. A plan-check comment or an inspection finding that means something must be built differently from the way it was drawn. There is no negotiating with this category, and the only useful response is to price it promptly and keep the sequence moving.
The second and third categories are why a budget carries a contingency, and why we say during the lot evaluation which parcels are likely to produce them. A house on a well-understood subdivision lot and a house on a wooded hillside carry genuinely different exposure, and you should know which one you are buying.
C 10.0 · Our undertakings
What we will not do
These are commitments about method, and you can hold us to every one because each is checkable against a document rather than a memory.
- We do not perform a change you have not approved on paper, and we do not invoice for one afterwards.
- We do not bury a change inside a draw request. It arrives as its own document with its own signature.
- We do not price a change verbally and write it up later, because the number people remember from a driveway conversation is never the same number.
- We do not treat a credit differently from an addition. Scope you remove comes back to you on the same form.
- We do not use a change order to recover something that was underestimated in the original contract. That is our problem, not a change in your scope.
The last one is the one to ask every builder about, because it is the mechanism behind most of the horror stories, and it is invisible until it happens to you.
Keeping the count down
The number of change orders on a project is decided almost entirely before construction starts. Projects that finish with very few are the ones where selections were settled during design, the lot was investigated properly, and the drawings were coordinated before submittal.
Projects that finish with dozens are usually projects that started early to catch a season. The weeks saved at the front are spent several times over later, and the cost of a decision rises steeply the further into the build it is made.
A change order is a good tool. Needing forty of them is a planning result, not a paperwork result.
The rest of the money documents
A change order decides how a number is allowed to move. These decide what it contains and when it is paid.
What an allowance actually promises, and what it costs you when its basis is left unwritten.
How payments attach themselves to finished and inspected stages instead of to dates on a calendar.
The page above all of these: what a cost-per-square-foot figure contains, and the six questions worth putting to any proposal before it is signed.
Ask how many change orders our last few projects ran to
It is a fair question to put to any builder you are considering, and the shape of the answer tells you more than the number does. Bring it to the consultation.
River Rock Builders, LLC · 2024 Arkansas Valley Dr, Little Rock, AR 72212