Who got a gift for Christmas that was “wrong” because you did not specify it properly or completely?
Me! Speced a waist-length, yelow, unlined polin jacket, with a fold-down [old-fashioned type] collar and zipper closure, 46 or XL.
Got a tan, lined, 3/4 quarter length jacket with button closure, no rear slit, and no way to sit down comfortable in it.
Lordy, they don’t even read my specs in my own house!!!
Ralph,
But see, that happens when it becomes a design/build project. The prospecctive Owner must have a liaison that stays involved at all times. You wrote a requirements package but you had no input. Of couse, the situation requires that to some extent.
There are just some projects that are not suited to design build if you can’t assure your requirements have been met until delivery.
William
Oh, I missed all that!
I always thought Christmas was an A/H/G project
[Ask/Hope/Get] but guess I was wrong [again]
Color me idealistic!
The analogy carries, that is kind of what design/build is about - ask/hope/get. If you don’t want to be truly surprised, you have to keep your finger in the pie or what you get is what you get, not necessasrily what you asked for and almost never what you hoped for.
Like design/build, as the future owner of the project, you needed to hire your own consultant since the building process was ‘blind to you’ where they were fully instructed in the requirements and what could or could not be changed.
One also has to consider materials that are commercially available. Perhaps what you specified is no longer manufacturered. Did you check before you specified the product? What with new technologies, things we used to specify are unavailable or changed. Color is something that changes frequently and unlined might not be an option at this time of the year.
Perhaps a proprietary specification (manufacturer and catalog number) rather than a performance specification would have yielded better results. Anything you can do to simplify the task of the product procurement personnel helps. Amazon.com wish lists can be useful for this.
Did your specification require product data submittals, or color samples for selection? Did you reference the Division 01 substitution requirements?
Did you reject the non-conforming product, or stand in line at the store to return/exchange it yourself?
Did you use the right MF04 section number?
I suspect it was value engineered … or because it wasn’t ordered in enough time, the gifter purchased something similar and hoped to slide the substitution through the shop drawing phase without being caught.
My preference is to specify a mockup for such complex work results, however that requirement is often difficult to achieve on projects with tight schedules and immovable deadlines.
I found proprietary specifications via Amazon very useful this year. Didn’t stop some of the family from going off-list.
Next year, I’m adding a performance spec, for families whose living space is less than 1000 sf: No gift may exceed 8 cubic feet unless it can be stored outdoors or in an unconditioned shed without deleterious effects.
With family, it’s exceedingly difficult to reject non-conforming products. Which, I’m sure, is why I found a prior season’s non-conforming gift I gave in my grandmother’s end table, unused… I guess I can’t complain too much about the gifts I got.
I would say the item specified was not available anymore (yea right).