VER BRYCK ARCHITECTS

My basic complaint is that Mark should have told me upfront that my budget was much too small for what I wanted to do. I paid him the standard $2500 advance. with the understanding that he would be billing his time and that any unused portion of the fee would be refunded if we aborted the project, and that those billings would be waived and the advance would be applied to his percentage of construction costs if the project went forward. To try to save money, I developed the original drawings for the additions, which he gave to a friend he likes to use as the general contractor, for preliminary cost estimates. The resulting estimate was more than double what I thought was a generous construction budget. With hindsight, at that point we should have had a candid talk about why the estimate was so high, and what was feasible to do within my budget. Instead, Mark had me prepare drawings for a substantially reduced project. He submitted these to his friend, and the estimate came back 50% over my budget (not including the architect's percentage add-on or costs of kitchen cabinets, and appliances. Finally, I prepared plans for a very much scaled back project built on the footprint of my existing kitchen and sun room. At this point, Mark said he should have his assistant take my penciled drawings and turn them into cadcam drawings. I agreed, expecting that this would only take an hour or two of work. These plans were submitted to his friend and if the mudroom/shed addition was left out and the sunroom was rebuilt on its existing pad, the estimate came back within the original budget. But these plans were so hugely scaled down that this became a "throw away" project because they didn't give us much value and the next owners of our house would most likely either tear down the house, or tear out all of the remodeled work to make room for an expanded addition. As a result, we weren't willing to spend the amount originally budgeted on that work. At this point, I advised Mark that I couldn't afford to use him and asked if there was any refund available from the advance. I was shocked to learn that he had used up the entire advance (even though he had never put pencil to paper) and expected to be paid $900 for his associate's work on the cadcam drawings, plus additional money for his own time. The money wasted on the cadcam drawings was especially galling. I later showed the drawings to my kitchen designer (who did much better and very detailed cadcam drawings for free), who couldn't believe that so much time could have been spent doing so little. The only good that that came out of this experience was that I learned I would have to be my own general contractor and stop relying on an architect. Thanks to Angie's List, I finally got everything I wanted (except the downstairs bedroom and bath) for less than half of the budget I started with.