If I said yes to everything, I’d be the best builder in the world.
Every change. Every upgrade. Every “hey, can we add this.” Yes. Yes. Yes. I’d be the easiest guy on the planet to work with, and honestly, it would be the easiest version of this job.
But that isn’t the job. My actual job, the number one thing I’m here to do, is to be your advocate. Building your house just happens to be the way I do it.
What we cover before anything gets built
Sometimes being your advocate means telling you something you don’t want to hear: that the thing you’re excited about isn’t going to get you what you told me you actually wanted. That’s not me being difficult. That’s the work.
Before we start a project, we sit down with our clients for something we call a success meeting. Before the first wall goes up, we walk through the things that decide whether a build goes well or goes sideways. How we handle money. How we handle changes. Who makes which decisions, and when.
It sounds like the boring part. It matters more than almost anything else we do. Most of the frustration people carry out of a construction project didn’t start with bad craftsmanship. It started months earlier, with a question nobody asked while there was still time to act on the answer.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I can feel it early, whether a project is set up to succeed or whether we’re heading for trouble. I can’t hand you a spreadsheet that proves that. But I’ve built enough of these homes to feel it coming, and the times I’ve gone back and looked, the pattern holds up.
Why these conversations belong in public
At some point I realized there’s no reason you should have to hire us to hear any of this.
So I’m putting those conversations here. Before you’ve signed anything, with anyone. Me, or any other builder.
If you take what’s in these videos and use it to have a sharper conversation with a builder in another state, that’s a good outcome. The alternative is you learn what a change order is halfway through your build, which helps nobody.
Most of what we cover is the same ground we walk with clients during pre-construction. The difference is that here it’s free, and it’s early enough to be worth something.
What the series covers
Each video takes one of these conversations and walks through it the same way I’d walk a client through it.
How we price a home. Change orders. Allowances. When you actually have to make decisions, and what it costs when those decisions slide. The stuff that scares people, out in the open, where it can’t sneak up on you.
If you’re about to build, or you’re in the middle of it right now and something is keeping you up at night, tell me in the comments. Odds are it’s one of these conversations. Odds are it would make a good video. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a homeowner or you do this for a living, I want to hear what you’re wrestling with.
Because the best projects I’ve ever been part of all started the same way. The hard conversations happened early, back when there was still time for them to matter.
So let’s have them.
If I said yes to everything, I’d be the best builder in the world.
FOR YOUR PROJECT
Get a budget range built on your drawings, not averages.
A pre-construction conversation puts real numbers behind your project before decisions get expensive.
BUILDING IN BOULDER AND THE FRONT RANGE
Common questions
What is a success meeting?
It’s a working session we hold before construction starts, usually with the client and the architect in the room. We go through how money moves through the project, how changes get priced and approved, who holds authority over which decisions, and what the schedule actually depends on. Nothing gets built that day. It’s the meeting that determines how every meeting after it goes.
Do I have to be a Fernhill client for this to be useful?
No, and that’s the point of putting it here rather than keeping it inside our process. If you’re interviewing builders in Denver, Fort Collins, or anywhere outside Colorado, these are the questions to bring with you. A builder who welcomes them is telling you something. So is one who doesn’t.
What if we’re already under construction?
Have the conversation anyway. It’s less comfortable partway through a build, because some decisions are already made and some money is already spent. It’s still far cheaper than discovering an allowance overrun at drywall. Start with the change order process and the current budget, in that order.
Alex Molkentin
Third-generation builder and president of Fernhill Build Studio, a design-build firm in Boulder, Colorado. His work centers on disciplined design, transparent budgets, and close collaboration with architects. Featured in Modern in Denver.
