Mastering the Remodel: Insider Secrets from an Expert in NYC Design Build

Transcription

Bella Bennett: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the NYC Design Build podcast. I’m Bella, and I’m really happy you’re here. Today we are talking about something I care a lot about — the remodeling process. It’s more than just picking materials or changing the layout. It’s about creating a space that truly works for your daily life.

When the process is well planned and done right, it can make your home feel more comfortable, efficient, and more personal. To help us break it all down, I’m joined by Zak from NYC Design Build. Zak, welcome to the show again. How are you?

Zak Van Buren: I am well, thank you, Bella.

Bella Bennett: Perfect. So let’s start. Here comes my first question.

What are the overall steps homeowners should expect throughout the remodeling process? From the initial planning to the completion, what are the key things that they should be prepared for in each stage?

Zak Van Buren: If you go through our remodeling process via the design build model — or that approach — it’ll streamline things quite a bit. You won’t have to do as many interviews or deal with as many potential different trades, organizations, managers, or other consultants to run the project. If you work with a design build firm, one of the biggest advantages is that most design build firms can pretty much accommodate you “setting and forgetting it” — just leaving your keys with them and making design decisions, which we’ll come to in a second. But you shouldn’t have to put the project together.

So, really the first step is to start thinking about how you want to structure the project. If you’re the kind of person who wants to get into the nuts and bolts of things, or you’re someone who prefers to have full input on every single stage down to the stud, you might want to structure the job differently.

If you do decide to move forward with a design build firm, your initial phases are going to involve your designer and you arriving at a floor plan and elevation drawings that make sense for the use of the overall space of the home or the apartment.

So in the first stage, the part that you’re involved with as a homeowner is the design stage — again, spatial planning — before you get to the finished materials.

Behind the scenes, the homeowner can assume that at this point in time, a lot of the expediting and nuts-and-bolts, architect-of-record type stuff — like filing with the DOB and getting permits together — is going on. Also, if you’re in a doorman building, or a co-op or condo or something, there’s going to be some approval needed on the management side of the building that you’re in.

All of that needs to be managed, and a design build firm will have a liaison situation running point for you on all of those fronts. So you don’t have to worry about that. You just have to focus on the finished material schedule and selections.

Your finished materials and your spatial plan — floor plans, elevation drawings, all that kind of stuff — once approvals arrive to start construction, we would begin demo. So you’d have demolition.

Usually, at this point in time, the homeowner is still working with the design team and maybe production a little bit to think about some finished material selections, depending on your scope of work.

The first wave of finished materials we’re going to need are rough selections, like plumbing, so that we can do the rough plumbing and everything like that.

And you’ll basically have quite a few, depending on the scope of work. The first phase is going to be a lot of demolition. You’ll go into your home and you’ll see either all of it or part of it blown to bits.

That can be a pretty emotional thing — for people to see their home in that situation. We always think that you really start to learn about the character of a client or a homeowner at that stage.

Once you’ve seen the whole place completely demolished and you’re starting to make decisions, it really sinks in that this is real. So you can expect that — and probably some feelings that go along with it.

At that point in time, once all the walls are exposed, you can make all your final refinements and decisions with regard to electrical points and water points and all your plumbing decisions — all that kind of stuff.

That phase is often a time where initial ideas about floor plans might get some minor revisions — just little tweaks here and there. Once you’re in the space, standing in it fully demolished, and you can tape off or render, even sometimes visualize, what the space can look like — it really starts to take on a whole other dimension.

So usually there are some adjustments at that stage.

Pushing through — sometimes this phase can be a little bit annoying for some homeowners, depending on your scope of work. This is where permits start to be approved, and additional permits are being approved so that the work can continue to move forward.

And yes, sometimes there’s a little bit of lag that’s outside of everyone’s hands. That’s probably the most brutal part of the process for most people. In New York City particularly, if it’s a smaller project, hopefully it’s just a smaller kind of unforeseeable or uncontrollable delay.

If it’s a larger project that also involves maybe Landmarks or something like that — or a community review, God forbid — you can sometimes hit… yeah, no better way to put it than delays or snags or hurdles, obstacles.

And sometimes those timeframes are a little bit outside of everyone’s control — even with the best expeditor, architect of record, and build team.

At the end of the day, sometimes it comes down to who’s inspecting your plans, whether that person went on vacation. I see that every year. I see plans end up in the laps of examiners, and then you don’t hear from them for weeks — they’ve been on holiday or something — and you’re just twiddling your thumbs, wondering where your…

Plumbing permit is… So all that stuff happens. Then there’s the final push into the installation of the finished materials — and that’s when you can also start to play around with things if you wanted to make some last-minute changes or something like that. Or if you’re adding to scope, that can all happen there.

And yeah, depending on the size of the project, you’re going to be dealing with different timetables in terms of duration. But most clients find the finished material selection process — at the beginning — and then the final tweaks and refinements at the end…

And of course, in most real long-term renovations, you don’t have those sort of TV moments — those DIY show moments or HGTV moments where it’s like “Ahh!”

In our space, particularly in the way that we do design build, it’s not built for that kind of a revelation. To me, I’m always horrified when that part of the show pops up, ’cause I’m like — I couldn’t imagine doing a huge renovation without the homeowner’s input the entire way through.

So it should not be a surprise. It should be the opposite of a surprise at the end. It shouldn’t be a big reveal.

Yeah — but the goal is, of course, for everyone to be really jazzed about the new space. And then, yeah, we prepare a deep clean and get you guys ready for your move-in and all that stuff, if that’s part of the scope of work.

So yeah, the process — I feel like, in my experience — has shown me that homeowners tend to be very excited about the finished material selection. Then after that, very understandably, most clients are just:

“Let’s get this done, let’s get this done, let’s get this done.”

I get it. It’s New York City. A huge percentage of our clients — of any design build in New York City — are almost always carrying a previous rental or mortgage situation that they’re transferring out of into the new place. So those months of double carry can be rough.

We know. We’re… mm-hmm… we’re not trying to slow anything down on our end, that’s for sure.

Bella Bennett: Thank you so much for that.

And my second question is: Remodeling can come with unexpected challenges.

What are the biggest challenges homeowners typically face during a remodel, and how do you handle them?

Zak Van Buren: Yeah. Um, well, let’s start with the fact that there are really several different types of worlds or silos of challenges in New York City.

I’ll just go into the two biggest groups or themes of issues New York City homeowners and prospective renovators face. And it’s worth going into, because they are very different based on the architecture and just the structure of the occupancy.

So, for example, in doorman buildings — or high-rises, elevator buildings, let’s say — because the homeowner’s space is part of a larger envelope, and we have access to a lot of, usually, structural drawings or engineering drawings or file drawings previously, we have access to a lot of information.

The good thing, in a sense, is that there’s a lot of refinement as to what the homeowner can do. There are a lot of limitations, because obviously you’re in the envelope of a much larger building.

The most obvious thing is: it’s often trickier to relocate wet areas if you’re in an apartment in an elevator building, because most buildings don’t want you to massively expand a wet area over a dry area. So you have wet-over-dry restrictions.

In terms of how crazy you can go with a renovation — obviously, if you’ve got neighbors directly above you, below you, to the left, and to the right of you — you can only go so many directions.

In terms of challenges with people who are in elevator buildings, sometimes the annoyances are in the building approval process, because there’s a lot of coordination between your building management entity and the DOB. A design build firm — we will play kind of air traffic controller of all that.

We’ll keep that moving along so that the homeowner doesn’t have to — or has to in the most minimal way possible. “Here, you gotta sign this,” blah blah blah.

So in elevator buildings, it’s largely about building approval, and having the work done in such a way that you’re not going to upset or ruffle any feathers with your building engineers or your neighbors or anything like that — ’cause it’s very easy to do.

Again, if you’re getting a renovation in an apartment building — in a doorman building or an elevator building — I think that whichever team you onboard, whoever you select to do the work, one thing you might not be thinking about but really need to focus on is: does that team or organization have an extremely good communication process?

In other words, are they really responsive via email — text less so, but let’s say via email — is their communication fluid, comprehensive, straightforward?

The reason I bring that up is because you need a firm that has experience navigating through building management, DOB, sometimes Landmarks, and any other city agency that needs to be negotiated with. Sometimes DOT gets brought into the picture.

So you want to have an organization — you want to have a design build firm, if you are selecting a design build firm — that has experience navigating those issues. Because often it’s in communication fluidity, understanding, and the experience to be able to communicate the options to the homeowner throughout the process.

Because often you’ll get to these bottlenecks in the approval process. Again, in most doorman or managed buildings — elevator buildings — work ahead, you’ll often end up in a situation where if you file one way, it can save you a month or two. If you file another way, it might take a lot more time.

And sometimes by understanding it and working in a very collegial way with the management entity, you can streamline the process and hopefully get things done faster.

And then also, in apartment buildings, one thing a lot of people don’t think about that ends up being a challenge — and hence your question about unforeseen challenges — is finished material deliveries.

In a lot of apartment buildings, they can be incredibly challenging. I feel like I’m relatively lucky — in the last 20 years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a finished material that ended up where we could not find a solution to bring it up into a space.

But I have had several close calls, and one situation where an unbelievable task had to be performed: an entire 11-and-a-half-foot length of marble countertop was brought seven flights up the stairs. That was many hundreds of pounds being brought up many flights of stairs. People were taking shifts. It was brutal.

But I only bring that up because the reason you can avoid that is through good design. Of course, you want to have designers who are cognizant of that — which I think is why I’ve been lucky enough to have only had that happen a handful of times in my career.

But I have heard about it happening tons. You can YouTube it — they’re hilarious — people trying to get pianos up into fifth-floor apartments, or pieces of artwork that cannot be disassembled and reassembled. A lot of cabinetry, millwork…

Just getting deliveries up into your apartment can sometimes be really difficult. You always want to make sure that your designer — whoever you work with — measures all of those dimensions in the elevators, if there’s a freight elevator or a service elevator.

And if there is no service elevator, a designer had better measure stairwell apertures and all that kind of stuff to be able to get large objects in.

Those are some of the kinds of things… oh, and also, elevator buildings and doorman buildings often will have, obviously, much narrower work hours, right? So they don’t really want to have any noise starting until sometimes 9:30, 9:45, even 10 o’clock. That adds up over time.

And also, they usually want tools off… we’re lucky if we get to 5 o’clock. It’s usually something like — often it’s even 4. Some buildings, they even want the noise down earlier. If there are kids in the area — kids who live in nearby units and are back after school at 3 — they want noise winding down by like 3:45 and stuff.

So in elevator and doorman buildings, you sometimes get restricted work hours. On top of that, because you have to put down so much protection in the common areas — in the hallways and the lobbies — often that’s just even more time that workers have to spend doing things that are not directly renovating your home.

So that can also affect average construction times per square foot.

If you’re in a separate house, you can expand the work hours a little bit. You get more out of your workday — I should say that’s a better way to put it.

And if anything’s happening on site where there’d be a huge advantage to doing certain kinds of work that are not disruptive — even on the weekends — you have a better chance of filing for a temporary work order from the city to work on a Saturday or Sunday.

You’re almost never going to get that kind of approval from a doorman building. You just… you have a better chance of getting an exception to do some work in a building on a Saturday or Sunday as you do getting a tip around Christmas from the engineer — as opposed to giving it to them. About your chances.

With regards to people in standalone and freestanding houses — brownstones — where you are the sole owner of the building, in those situations, your more likely annoyances are actually going to fall into…

Well, one major annoyance is — again — it always comes back to: anytime things are outside of our control, that’s always when the biggest annoyances happen.

So in terms of freestanding houses and brownstones, anytime we’re doing anything coordinating with the city — right? — in an elevator building or a doorman building, you as the tenant or resident, you don’t have day-to-day control or decision-making power over the sewage, water, and electric connections under the street, right? That’s taken care of by the building.

You just show up, pay your amenities fees and your mortgage, and you’re good to go.

When you are the owner of a piece of architecture, all that stuff of course falls in your lap. Which is not a big deal — you just need a design build firm who knows how to negotiate through all that time, those inspections, and do the proper assessments with properly verified and licensed tradespeople who are going to tell us exactly whether or not there needs to be an expansion of service in one area, or whether there’s an electrical upgrade, or whatever that might be.

That takes a lot of coordination. That can often be a frustration for homeowners when we’re dealing with something like the Department of Sanitation or the Department of Transportation — dealing with maybe a tree out front whose roots are going down into the area that we need to excavate.

So any kind of coordination with the city often gets frustrating.

And when you have — let’s say — a brownstone or something, you are just directly dealing with DOB inspectors all the time. There are many more inspections that usually unfold.

Also, when homeowners in New York City — who own the entire building — are doing work, it’s an older building. So if it’s a brownstone, you often have additional structural work — and that’s, of course, your responsibility.

And that’s much more likely in older townhouses and brownstones — buildings that were built in the 1860s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, turn of the century — wood frame houses, masonry and brick houses.

You’re going to have — we’re going to have — various forms of degradation over time, whether it’s structural… hopefully it’s just superficial.

But generally speaking, there’s usually some bolstering that needs to be done in a lot of those areas. You just have more responsibility in that regard.

And I would say because of that — because there are more variables that affect townhouses and brownstones — yeah, just a wider spectrum of potential unforeseeable issues can arise.

And again, I’m talking about structural. So, for example, you buy a brownstone in Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, whatever. The amount of time people are given to assess the home they’re buying in New York City is absolutely crazy.

Oh — by the way — a very good way to get ahead of this is to bring a contractor, or a NYC Design Build professional, or somebody with you when you’re buying a home, so that they can flag — not necessarily horrific concerns, because you would imagine that the real estate… I shouldn’t know if I should make that assumption — you would hope that any really horrific issues were already being flagged by the previous owners or during the home inspection and all that kind of stuff.

But put that aside for a moment — even in a very well-inspected situation, everyone’s in good faith — you still don’t know what’s behind a lot of these walls. And a lot of these walls have been covering issues that might go back to the previous century.

So unless you probe in between every potential joist, you’re not going to know where there could be some significant issues.

Now, there are a lot of things you can eyeball from the interior of a space to let you know that things can’t be too bad, right? You don’t want to see huge cracks down the side of the perimeter wall — that might be an issue. But other than that, it’s often hard to spot.

But all the good news is that all of these things can be taken care of. What you want is a design build firm that’s going to do a lot of probes during the design process so that you can flag any major issues prior to even doing demolition — things like that.

What’s the big win there? The big win is: let’s say you find that…

Now, if you work with a good design build firm, based on your type of building, age, and condition, they should let you know in advance — and if they don’t, that’s a huge red flag — what they foresee as potential issues with buildings like yours.

You want to then ask the design build firm:

“Okay, design build firm — you foresee this as maybe a 1-in-10 chance of happening. What’s the average cost to abate that problem or issue?”

Let’s say it’s joists, or there’s a concern about the structural integrity of the staircase, or whatever the case might be — cool. Let’s take that money and put it aside, right?

If we end up not having to spend it — hallelujah, we throw a party or we all go to Cancun or something. But if you do use it, it’s there.

So you want to get ahead of that, because once you cleave that money away for potential problems, you want to keep it — so that if something does pop up, it doesn’t cost you something else. You know?

So you want to make sure that all of that kind of budgeting — even for potential issues — is done on the front end.

So that, for example, you don’t overextend purchasing a finished material, and then later find out that you have to spend X amount. You could have probably — if you had known that in advance — made some different decisions with regard to your scope of work or finished material selections, that could have easily put the money aside for that work.

So you just need a really comprehensive design build firm that’s going to look at this from every phase for you — and really try and protect your investment.

When it comes to annoyances, I’d say the top ones in New York City, regardless of where you are, are going to be: coordinating with the Department of Buildings or the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

And then — in such a dense city — organizing and scheduling all those deliveries and installations, and getting all of the materials into your unit.

If you’re a townhouse, we all know what those streets usually look like — parking’s usually horrible, all that kind of stuff.

If you’re in an elevator building, you’re dealing with service elevator schedules and things like that.

So those are some of the things that definitely annoy homeowners in New York City.

I would also say the most obvious one, which I didn’t even bother bringing up — because it’s New York City and it’s the default — I’m not going to pull any punches here: it’s the astronomical cost.

And a lot of the cost has to do with what I just mentioned.

I’ll give you an example: Google-searching the average cost of just fill in the blank — if you’re talking about materials or things like that — it almost doesn’t work in New York City.

It’s better to go to websites like Sweeten or talk to a design build firm like us — or like me — and work with someone who’s transparent and open, who will give you all the numbers you might want to know about, specific to New York City.

But the funny thing about New York City — the reason why so many different studies or averages don’t map well over costs here — is because of things like:

You have congestion pricing in lower Manhattan, which everybody knows about now. The knock-on effect to that is that every single material delivery, every tradesperson, every worker, every single vehicle coming to your job site has to pay an extra XYZ — every single day, every single time they come in.

Who do you think that cost is being passed on to? Of course — it’s being passed on to the homeowner.

Also, additional super annoyances that have to do with finances and penalizing New York City homeowners and renovators — like parking.

The parking tickets are very real. They come fast and furious. And there’s often nothing that we, as tradespeople or installers, can do about it.

If the structural steel guy with a flatbed truck full of 19 tons of structural steel is scheduled to come down your small, narrow street to deliver the steel — and human beings are going to do it as fast as humanly possible — it’s going to be tight. There’s going to be cars honking. It’s bananas.

And the homeowner ends up co-paying for that — all those fees.

All that — yeah, licensing, and then insurance.

And that’s the other one — particularly in the last 10 years, and particularly, of course, in condos, co-ops, doorman buildings, elevator buildings — the amount of insurance carry that is being required now by buildings.

What’s sad to me is that it’s really knocked out a lot of smaller renovation companies — like mom-and-pop renovation companies. A lot of them have had real difficulty competing in those spaces now.

Because if the building wants $10 million in total insurance coverage or whatever — hypothetically — who do you think is paying for that?

The controctors.

The contractor’s premiums go way up. Sometimes, just to carry that kind of insurance for a short period of time can be astronomically expensive.

They just pass that on to the homeowner. That mom-and-pop contracting firm can’t absorb that. Their profit margins aren’t that huge.

So a lot of those very high insurance premiums also get passed on to homeowners in New York City — and that’s certainly an annoyance for them as well.

Bella Bennett: Oh, it sounds exhausting. Like, working in New York City — there are a lot of frustrating and exhausting parts, and unexpected costs, and working in buildings… it’s something I didn’t even consider.

It sounds like a lot of work.

Zak Van Buren: Yeah, there are a lot of moving parts. The last thing you want to do in this life is get involved in a renovation in New York City without very experienced professionals — you’re gonna be in a world of hurt.

If you’re gonna hire bad contractors or less experienced contractors, you better hire an amazing lawyer.

Okay? Just saying — because it’s coming.

Bella Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well…

Let’s talk a little bit more about which parts the homeowners need to be included in, and which parts you take care of. Could you please extend that one a little bit more?

In which stages should homeowners actively collaborate with you, and in which stages do you take the lead to make the process easier for them?

Zak Van Buren: Yep. Good question.

So, I don’t think that there’s one “McDonald’s version” of managing that aspect of interaction and dialogue between the homeowner and the design build firm. Everyone’s different.

I started my career working for a firm that just happened to have a huge percentage of their clientele… we did a lot of pied-à-terres in New York City for them. These were places where business executives and other people would just stay for a week at a time or so in New York City.

So I did a lot of those early in my career. Now, those clients — they reached out to us because they knew that we could just… you can set it and forget it. You can just hand us the keys, and we can coordinate via email.

I remember, back in the day — like 16, 17 years ago — you’d send clients overseas screenshots of mockups, or 2020 and SketchUp drawings and stuff.

And now you can walk together through 3D renderings if you want. So it’s really — that’s been amazing to see. And that’s become more and more cost-effective.

It used to be prohibitively expensive to do that kind of 3D modeling — now it’s not so bad. It stings, but it’s not horrific. And it means that you can collaborate over great distances.

So, at the very start, I would say — sometimes you don’t necessarily have to even be in the same space. A good design build firm can hopefully work with a client who’s never on site — or work with a client who loves the process.

Maybe before their dreams were smashed and they went into advertising or publishing or who knows what — maybe their first dream was to be an architect, right?

And this is their renovation, and they want to be in the nuts and bolts of everything.

Those people are out there, and you have to be able to help them stay excited and be as engaged as they want to be.

I always find that there’s a gray area. I would think about it — if I were a homeowner — like your mechanic or your cardiologist or something.

You want to be involved in the decisions that are really going to impact the outcomes and stuff like that.

Do you want to see every single granular thing?

I think sometimes that can get a little bit… that can get a little annoying for both parties, because it’s going to delay everything.

I can do something and talk to you about it. But I can’t do something and tell you exactly what I’m doing as I’m doing it without losing some time.

But I think most clients understand that, and an organic middle path is always found.

I think that site meetings are very important. And then during the design process, you’re going to be meeting pretty frequently with your design build team to make decisions.

But in terms of when to bring a design build firm in initially — as I mentioned earlier in one of the earlier questions — my recommendation is: whether you bring a design build firm, or an engineer, an independent third party, an architect friend, or an architect you pay — or whomever — get them involved when you’re very seriously looking at closing on a home, a house, or an apartment.

I would start there.

You don’t necessarily have to hire that design build firm. Be very transparent with them. Tell them: “I’d like to get your feeling about this.”

And if you build a dialogue and you like who you’re talking with, and you feel comfortable and they seem experienced — as long as you let them know that you are strongly considering doing a renovation — they should probably make the time to come and look at the space.

If it’s an apartment or something that’s on StreetEasy or Zillow or something, sometimes we can learn a lot just from looking at the imagery that’s available online.

If it’s a townhouse or something like that, we definitely want to go in and look at the utilities and the connections in the cellar — also look at it structurally.

So yeah, I would say it’s always good to start the process with a design build firm when you’re looking to acquire a new home that you believe is going to involve renovation.

So if you’re a buyer in New York City, and you’re looking to buy a townhouse, or a brownstone, or an apartment, or a loft, or whatever it might be — it’s really good to bring in a contractor or someone from a design build firm to give you their professional take on it.

I’ve done just under 500 renovations in New York City, which means I’ve probably looked at — or walked into — 1,200 properties at least. Something like that, I’m sure.

We’ve seen a lot.

Once you find a firm that you like, hopefully you find them on the front end — as you’re closing, or when you close on your new space. But you want to… usually — obviously — there’s good run time or good lead time between when you become probably north of 90% sure you’re going to acquire a space, and when you get keys in hand, right?

Some of the best ideas come when things are pretty much formally done — like the deals are done for the new apartment or the new home, and you’re just waiting on, let’s say, some bank signatures or some other paperwork to clear. But you’re north of 90%.

Again, just be transparent with design build firms and tell them: “Look, we are like 90% closed on this. We’re looking to close in May, June, July” — whatever it might be.

If you see that target downstream, you should start talking to design build firms two months out, three months out, four months out — depending on the situation.

And you can hopefully just start on the design work first, if you want to work that way. You don’t necessarily have to sign on with a full deposit for the full project if you’re still at 90% on closing the space.

But you can just get the ball rolling on the design and all that kind of stuff, and start getting ahead of the game — so that you’re not starting from scratch when you get the keys. You want to get a bit of a head start.

A good design build firm will also figure out how to streamline the total timeline.

So, if you bring in a design build firm prior to even having keys in hand, you can start strategizing on the filing process — which is going to be based on the scope of work, the type of building, and any structural, mechanical, or service-related issues that you guys might be addressing.

So if you don’t bring the design build firm on early, you want as much lead time as possible.

If you can’t bring them on several months before you have keys in hand, then several weeks is better than zero.

And if you just wait until you have keys in hand, just know — which I’m sure you already do — that your double carry is going to be longer.

Assuming you’re in New York City or thereabouts, if you want to reduce the amount of time you’re going to have to pay rent or a mortgage on your existing residence and the carry costs of the new mortgage, you want to bring on a design build firm as early as possible.

And of course — I don’t know, I don’t want to say I’ve talked us out of work — but I’ve probably talked us out of as much work as we’ve brought on board.

And by that I mean: if you bring on a design build firm — or an architect, or a professional — to lend eyes to an apartment or a building you’re looking to acquire, take their feedback very seriously.

That’s the other thing. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. My job is to be fully transparent and to manage expectations.

If I see things in a space, I’m just going to let you know. And I apologize — my goal is not to make anyone feel unenthusiastic about a house that maybe they thought was really cool and met a lot of their needs.

But bear in mind also that, in my recollection, I can’t think of anything I’ve ever seen that had no solution.

So there’s always going to be a solution to an issue — and that’s why you’re bringing them there, right? To let you know what that might cost.

And that’s a good thing about — again — one thing that’s very prudent about bringing someone from a really good design build firm is that, unlike…

Architects and engineers are utterly phenomenal at what they do…

We wouldn’t hire and pay them if they weren’t! But their scope of work — their job — is not to necessarily know the cost of every single linear foot of branch line plumbing, or what the trade rate is for every single dimmer switch.

Totally understandable.

Someone in the design build world usually does. So we can be a bit of a twofer for you. We can come in, see some things, and let you know — from our perspective — what might be an issue.

And I’ll let you know, while we’re standing holding our coffees on the sidewalk in front of the place. I’ll let you know right on the back of a napkin what I think fixing this — or that — might cost. I’ll give you the range of costs for every single one of those things.

And I’m not trying to be a shameless promoter of people who are experienced within this profession — within design build — but I can’t think of anything more important to do than that.

You have such limited time when you’re… we’ve all been there, we’ve all seen it.

When you’re buying an apartment in New York City — or a townhouse — you’ve got these open houses, and it’s like a cattle call in there. It looks like the stock exchange trading floor — everyone’s jumping over each other to put in bids.

I know that’s an exaggeration — but it’s not that big of an exaggeration. I think we all know.

You have so little time. It really does not work in the prospective home buyer’s favor.

There’s no advantage to collapsing the timeframe of exposure and time spent in the space. You really want to maximize that. I can’t emphasize that enough.

You might only have… I mean, we all know stories of people who bought — I can think of a loft (I won’t say the exact address) in SoHo where the owners spent 35 minutes total in that loft before they were going into contract.

So if you bring someone on board who can just give you some numbers to consider — because the last thing you want to do is acquire space that’s in a great location, ticks a lot of boxes… and then realize:

“Oh wow, okay, I didn’t realize the cost for renovation was going to be that.”

So now we’re going to have to stage things out a bit. Maybe we’ll have to take care of the most essential things in the first phase.

Obviously, it’s better to know those kinds of numbers on the front end.

Also, when you’re making massive financial decisions — how to structure the purchase, or whatever the situation might be, whatever resources you need to move around — isn’t that the best time to know how much you might need to cleave off from here, or move things around?

It’s obviously better to have a more holistic picture of the full spectrum of possibilities.

And I can tell you: what’s the best 20% area where this could land? What’s the worst 20%? And what’s the most likely 60% landing path in the middle?

That can really affect whether or not you think a place is a good value — or if it’s going to be a place that might not return its value on the investment for a slightly longer period of time, because of what you might have to put into it.

Yeah, I would say bringing a design build firm on early in the process is really critical.

Bella Bennett: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

And okay — my third question is actually something we’ve already talked a little bit about. But I want to dive a little deeper into communication.

Because clear communication is key to a smooth remodeling process.

How do you ensure consistent, transparent communication with homeowners during this remodeling journey — especially when things don’t go as planned, or when surprises come up?

Also — can you share a time when strong communication helped overcome a challenge during your…

Zak Van Buren: Project? Sure, of course.

So I would say first — at the very beginning, when you’re vetting design build firms, contractors, or even architects — bring that very question up. It’s incredibly important. Ask them what you’re asking me, Bella:

“How do you approach communication? How do you handle reporting? How do you share information and handle decision-making processes — decision-making trees and matrices?”

Any good design build firm — it’s 2025, okay — if any of us have ever paid for anything with our phone, or ever been on Facebook, or sent an email from our phone, then we can operate any number of these project management apps.

There’s a market for it — someone’s going to do it, and someone else is going to try to do it better. So now we’ve had 15 years of trial and error and competition in the project management platform space. And all of those apps now have communication widgets built in.

So talking to design build firms about how they utilize technology for communication is a worthwhile question.

Because people have different communication styles. That’s also part of the conversation. Are you the kind of homeowner or renovator who likes daily updates? We can do that.

If that’s overkill, let’s talk about it. Does once a week sound better? Is that good for you? We can summarize, and obviously bring up anything time-sensitive throughout the week if it arises.

But typically, once a week we’ll give you:

A production update

A building approval update

A finished materials update

That tends to capture the needs of — I don’t know — probably north of 90% of people I’ve worked with.

It’s like: “Hit me up when something’s time-sensitive and I need to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down within the next hour. Otherwise, I’ll take three summary reports a week.”

Now — it’s not uncommon, particularly in New York City, for people to have professions where the design build firm needs to know in advance that the homeowner is not always reachable.

I’ve had clients whose jobs simply don’t allow them to reply quickly. You could not always get them within 10 minutes or an hour — even just to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on something.

A design build firm has to know that on the front end.

It will affect how the project is scheduled — and that’s okay.

What I mean is, if the homeowner has a lifestyle or job where, between this hour and that hour, they cannot even approve a paint swatch — cool, no problem. Now we know.

It’s more likely we may have little micro-delays — maybe it’s an afternoon delay — because we have to get a hold of someone. That transparency just reduces frustration and increases clarity on both sides, right from the start.

So when it comes to communication, you want to talk about both style and logistics:

When can you be reached?

How often do you want to be reached?

What kinds of decisions do you want to be part of?

Because a design build firm starts with this assumption — it goes without saying:

We will always involve you in the decisions that require your input. That’s a very reasonable and obvious statement. Cool — that’s our default position.

There’s no way we’re going to paint a wall a color you didn’t approve of — because the last thing we want to do is paint it twice, right?

There’s no way we’re going to build a room of a certain size without getting your sign-off — because the last thing we want to do is build a wall twice.

So all that stuff goes without saying.

Then you’ve got other things — like I’ve had homeowners tell me:

“Zak, an expeditor is an expeditor…”

Whoever can get me my permits the fastest from the architect — I don’t need to interview four guys, I don’t need to look at four proposals — you tell me. Cool. I can do that.

If you’re someone who’s like, “I want to know the birthday of the expeditor that’s going to pull my plumbing permit,” — that’s how involved you want to be — no problem.

Here’s Tracy. Here’s Stacy. Here’s Nick. This is what they charge. Who do you like? And I’ll tell you anything you want about all three of them, and you can make your choice.

So having that conversation about how intimately involved clients want to be — that’s really important.

I’ve had clients who wanted to be involved in even conversations about energy efficiency. Awesome. We love it. We want clients to be involved with as much as they want to be involved with.

Now here’s where it gets interesting: I’ve had clients who wanted to independently design their own plumbing valves. That’s when I had to tell the client:

“We can talk about that… but that might lead to some unexpected delays.”

So yes, it all depends on how much you want to be involved.

Now, with regard to communication throughout the process — obviously, weekly updates.

There are definitely times during the project when it makes a lot of sense to meet on site, if at all possible. Now of course, we have technology that allows us to have vastly more efficient meetings without having to be in person.

I remember a time when we had to go take photos for clients overseas, email them, wait for a response, and then go back and take new photos.

Now? I can literally — if you’re in Singapore and I’m in your apartment — FaceTime you, or my plumber can, or our tile installer can, and you can look in real-time and say:

“Oh — I’d like that a quarter of an inch to the left.”

It’s cool. We can do that.

In terms of other decisions: if you need an architect of record and your design build firm is going to recommend a couple, that might be one where there’s a more meaningful decision to be made.

Because when it comes to different architects of record — who might be running the filing process — you want to hear their approach, depending on the project.

Those kinds of decisions can actually impact timelines. That’s when you get input from the architects, and then have a conversation with the build team — if you already have one you like — or with your owner’s rep or whoever is helping you, to sort out which pros and cons line up best with your needs.

Other stages of communication where homeowners are always involved in New York City — obviously — your building approval process with your building.

So if you live in a co-op, condo, elevator building, or doorman building, some documents are probably going to have to go through your email.

No problem. If you’re someone who has literally zero time, we’ll put all the documents together and just forward them to you — you can just literally send them on.

Some buildings actually want the homeowner to be the main point of contact for some of that stuff.

So yeah — I think the most important thing is just to be open and transparent about your needs and preferences, with regard to communication style, at the front end with your design build firm.

Bella Bennett: Okay. It’s so nice that you can adjust depending on the homeowner’s availability and communication preference. That’s cool.

Okay, before we wrap up — these were all of my questions, by the way, for today — before we finish, I want to ask you this:

If there’s another architect out there listening right now who’d enjoy this kind of conversation — why should they come on the show?

Zak Van Buren: Yeah, we were talking about having some architects on occasionally, just to chit-chat about issues that are germane to New York City–specific design build — or just even construction and filing issues.

I think that, obviously, anything you could possibly want to know is on the DOB website.

But for a novice — a non-professional — the average homeowner to go through all of that kind of stuff is…

Look, we all know architecture students whose eyes glaze over looking at some of that code verbiage and documentation.

So the idea is — if you’re an architect out there and you like talking about architectural issues in New York City — whether they’re filing-related, client management–related, building management–related, aesthetic, or about dealing with the creative complexities of blending different types of architectural periods and styles — we’d love to chat.

And yeah, share that information with homeowners. That’s the whole point — to demystify a lot of this process and help people feel more informed.

Bella Bennett: Yes, exactly.

And thank you so much, Zak, for being here and walking us through the remodeling process. You shared a lot of clear, practical tips that can really help people understand what to expect — and how to approach their own projects with more confidence. To everyone listening or watching, I hope this gave you a better picture of  what the remodeling journey looks like—from planning and design to the final result.

If you’d like to learn more or get in touch with Zak and NYC Design Build, you’ll find their website link in the description.

Thanks again for joining us—and we’ll see you next time!