How to avoid being a victim of your own project

Coast Construction Company has rebuilt thousands of fire-damaged buildings in Alameda and Contra Costa counties since 1983.   

Every burned building has at least one owner (often a couple or multiple people), and most of those people have never been through a major construction project that includes their insurer, the city/county permit department, an engineering company, an architect, their contractor, the contractor’s multiple sub-contractors, a landscape company, PG&E, the weather, their mortgage company, and whatever else may be going on in the economy.

People are conditioned by consumer culture that they can have food within minutes of wanting it while driving around or that they can order nearly anything on Amazon and have it same/next day.  

Burned/soaked building recovery does not work this way.  Ever. 

This page wants to reframe your expectations to understand that much of what you may reasonably expect just will not match reality.   This is crucial to helping you avoid tremendous emotional frustration and deep disappointment in your upcoming battle to recover your house and move back into it. 

The first 3 months:  Not much happens to the building.

Coast Construction cannot rebuild your building until the money to do it is pre-approved by your insurer, and we have a building permit from the City or County.  

After you file your claim with your insurer, the insurer will dispatch an adjuster who will come and look at both your house and our Scope of Work and pricing (if we have one by then – many won’t look at our work until they complete theirs).  

Weeks later, they finish their estimating, and they will then take more weeks to review our estimate, quibble about some details that they may hope could be excluded to save their company money (our estimating focus is on completeness, which can increase cost above an adjuster’s preliminary and -likely- “less complete” estimate).

After the adjuster haggles some and then eventually agrees with us regarding the entire Scope of Work that we mutually agree on, the whole reconstruction package and pricing figures get sent through the Insurance Company’s Claims Dept. chain-of-command in a process that can take MONTHS as each level reviews and audits the proposed total figure and the proposed list of work and materials.     

Our customers are often shocked that Coast doesn’t get a faster response from their insurer.  Here is the invisible reason why this could be:

Your insurer is a bureaucracy that is institutionally terrified of getting taken to the cleaners for large amounts of money – because that’s what happens when they aren’t careful.   Therefore, your five or six figure claims will probably silently get reviewed and approved/adjusted at three to five levels above your adjuster’s head before they are permitted to agree to any figure. 

Building Permit

Coast can’t legally start work without a building permit, so we must take our insurer-approved Scope of Work, and have it put into engineered drawings so that the government building permit department can know that what we will do is up to current building code. 

What year was your building built in?  Does it meet the current building code?  The Building Dept. will insist that it does before we’re done. 

Good news:  Coast can frequently get the insurer to agree to pay for engineering plans early on so that the plan and permit process happens at the same time as the insurance funds approval process.  We learned to do this to compress the time that we’ll wait, but there isn’t a permit office that we work with that’s efficient or convenient.  They can take weeks or months. 

Coast can’t start reconstruction work before these other entities are satisfied.  We’ll take care of handling them, but we have little to no control over them other than trying to be efficient in our own movements to get things moved forward (and we are always looking for any time advantage that we can gain here). 

Project Kick Off   

As a general contractor, we self-perform portions of projects and we may also subcontract parts of the project that require their own individual license, such as plumbing, electrical, drywall, and other trades.  Coast performs Project Management and acts as “one neck to choke” in the project, but there are usually multiple companies involved.  

Each company is given a scheduled block of time on each project calendar to complete their tasks.   Rarely will these people be working every day of their calendared block of time onsite. Most people go to work at their job daily, and some are surprised to learn that contracting is different – Coast or its subcontractors, will move staff from one project to another within a scheduled window, but will not normally work daily 9-5 at every job every day.  

It is Coast’s job to ensure that we manage the subcontractors into the scheduled windows and deadlines to stick to the overall job calendar. There are overlapping and interlocking processes that must happen in a particular order, and each group of workers may have multiple projects happening at any time at different jobsites. 

That means it is impossible to work on one building at a time start to finish – crews are moved around as building materials delivery and calendar allow.   Subcontractors may leave a jobsite for days or weeks at a time!  The bigger picture for Coast is whether they are on time regarding the overall project timeline. 

For example: Drywall installation happens in two stages:  Install it and screw it to the framing, and then STOP and wait for inspection.  Only then can the mud that covers the screws to make it paintable be put in.  The mud must dry before it can be sanded smooth, which triggers another inspection.  The drywall guys will therefore come and work on the house in chunks while rotating around to other buildings to work on different chunks elsewhere, and this creates an impression that “nobody’s at the house today” over and over, but there is a reason that these delays are present.   

The same goes for wiring and plumbing – each section of the project, and each trade must have its work inspected in stages, and Coast must manage all of these interlocking pieces to keep the project moving forward despite all of the delays that are just part of the project as it progresses.

No work can happen while we’re waiting for a building inspector.   

It would be nice if the county felt the same way about inspections that McDonald’s does about serving hungry people, but they don’t…    Therefore, your project’s calendar has a block of 8 weeks to do work that might actually take 4.  Some things are just beyond your General Contractor’s control, and we know to account for that up front (or we’d go out of business!). 

Keep in mind that Coast can’t collect payment until each of the stages that trigger a payment are completed and THEN we get the pleasure of waiting weeks (or more) for the insurer and/or mortgage company to release the funds to the building owner, who must let the payments clear their bank before they can pay us.   Coast is obligated to fund the entire project up front in this system, and this is why you will find us focused on getting the funds herded out of the insurer/mortgage – it all takes a lot of time!  – A lot more time than most people imagine is reasonable, but reality dictates that we must run our projects this way.

Project Completion

Coast can’t complete the project until our customer is satisfied that the project is done, so expect us to consult you to come up with a final “to-do list” of remaining tasks.  You can help us by being organized and aware as we go into the last bit – we want that list completed just as much as our customers do!