I would go the sneaky route Peter, and just put in a couple of hundred dollars for reproduction costs and call it something else. (I used to put in an upcharge for difficult clients, same way). if you end up with a client who sends you drawings when you need them, then you can give them a “good client discount” for the next job. if you get a client who claims poverty, get the drawings printed and delivered yourself. the good clients will love the “discount”; the bad clients are bad clients anyway.
I work entirely in-house, so I do not have the problem of not getting any drawings at all. Instead, my problem is design teams that keep putting off giving me drawings until they update something. It might be a big change in terms of design or massing, but usually will have zero impact on the specs.
I mean, reducing the curtainwall mullions from 4 foot on center to 3 foot 6 inches might be a critical turning point in your career, but I think of your building as the “L” shaped one with the grassy roof.
In line with Anne’s comments, a good thing for a an independent consultant to do is to stop once a year to evaluate the previsous year looking for lessons learned and how to incorporate corrections for the coming year.
Another good activity for that time is to evaluate all of your clients - who is cooperative, who provides requested information on a timely basis, who pays on timely basis, who is concerned about producing superior documents, who do you feel good working with, etc. Rank clients from top to bottom. Make the top clients your top priority to provide them your best service in the future - extend extra effort to meet their needs in terms of scheduling and appropriate fee levels. Don’t be super worried about how you are able to serve the lowest ranked clients - they are lowest on your piority list. If you refuse a project and they ask why, give them an honest answer. The goal is to have more higher ranked clients. The more higher ranked clients you have, the better you will feel about your professional life.
well, and like all the other things that will change because of BIM, the availability of information will as well. When the contractor uses the 40% or 50% documents (drawings and specs) for hard bids… and then every deviation between the 50% and the 100% is a cost upcharge, folks start making decisions early and sticking to them. when younger project managers get thrown under the bus because the designer is too busy waiting for the muse, the designers start to get in line – or finding their bonuses greatly reduced. Marc’s correct – the interior products (not the interior configuration) don’t matter all that much for these efforts, but all the architecture stuff sure does…
I see that the original question got side-tracked.
I work primarily on a HD 42-inch TV monitor. It allows me to view full size drawings at 75% magnification and to open several windows on one screen if I want to; I also have a 24-inch monitor next to the large screen where Outlook remains open all the time.
I went this route because we have difficulty getting hard copies of the drawings; even when we do, theyre outdated the day after printing. We can get PDF copies from our client at a days notice.
It takes a little while to get used to making a take-off on screen, but its as fast now as doing it on paper.