The first step in any significant project is to hire an architect who will work with you on the ins and outs of the project and generate a set of plans and elevations for the project.

Once you have those, they can be sent to us - at info@cascadiaengineering.com - and we will generate a proposal that includes our fee and what our retainer will be.

We have what we refer to as a “rolling queue” of projects. This means that we do projects in the order that they come in, and we are continuously updating our project list.

For a project to have a slot in our rolling queue, we need to have a signed contract and a retainer from the client.

One thing that’s important to note: we will give you a sense of where our rolling queue is when we issue our proposal to you. That will be a snapshot of where our backlog is at that moment in time. If you then take a week or a month to sign and return the contract, you may find that our start time has moved significantly.

We do this in order to honor those who commit to working with us first.

We certainly do! Reach out to us at info@cascadiaengineering.com and we’ll send you our local favorites.

Short version: That sounds bad and we never do it.

Long version: When we’ve done it in the past, it hasn’t saved time or money because we still end up drafting some version of the details in order to communicate our intentions with whoever is doing the drawings, and then we have to do an onerous back-and-forth editing process to get them right. It takes forever and is exhausting and sad for everyone involved. It’s like saving money by reading WebMD and removing your own tonsils instead of paying a live doctor to do it — you’re going to end up in the ER anyway…

Glad you asked!

The most fundamental building blocks of construction are Schedule, Cost and Quality.

In any decision you make on the project, you want to make sure you’re keeping track of its implications on those three categories.

As a general rule, you can control any two of those at a time, but not all three. You can say you want it high quality and soon, but it won’t be cheap. You can have it cheap and high quality, but it’ll take forever. And you can have it cheap and fast, but it’ll be poor quality.

Trying to find that sweet spot that accounts for all three factors is the number one thing that will help you get from conception to housewarming reception smoothly.

The very best thing you can do is work with your architect at the beginning stages of the project to determine precisely what it is that you want. Take the time you need to see models and visualizations of the proposed building and trust that it is time & money well spent.

What you don’t want to do is walk through the project once the walls are up and decide that you really would like one more window added, or one more wall removed. Adding features late in construction always increases their expense and never helps with your schedule.