580 Linwood

Now that we were ready to begin, our first hard decision had to be made. Do we go with a Design/Build firm or a traditional Architect and then find a General Contractor to manage the construction. We talked it over with friends who had gone both routes and did some research on the net. Ultimately, we felt more comfortable going the Design/Build route. For us, knowing that the person responsible for the design was working in tandem with the person responsible for the construction just makes sense. There are pros and cons for both and what works for you may be different and our remodeling experiencing would probably be totally different going the Architect route.

Once that was decided we started asking around for recommendations and asked to meet four different design/build firms. I think it was about two or three months for us to arrange times to meet with each, show them the house and give our remodeling list too. One thing we quickly realized was that our initial wish list had be scaled back significantly or our budget needed to increase significantly. One firm basically said anybody who said they could do what we wanted for less then $250K was lying. Two others were not so pessimistic but did caution that only through some hard design choices would we get close to our top-end budget. When we made our choice for which design/build firm to go with it was pretty clear to both of us. The two partners in Portico were well known in our circle of friends as doing great work; on time and close to budget.

As luck would have it our choice of going with Portico coincided with their having recently started or just starting several large whole house renovations. Since we were not in a huge rush we asked to move ahead as they could. Which basically meant that we would meet and go over the initial scope of the project, they’d come back with some ballpark figures and then we would wait until they had more time to dedicate and focus on our job. That ended up being about a three-four month delay but as the end of 2006 rolled around we started meeting and working on the designs.