The Client

I met the client for the first time last week, his name is Clark. I've quit estimating the number of emails that it's taken to get to this point. Before we found out about the delay due to the variance he had booked a flight back from his home in Panama. I drove down from Portland to meet him at the site Tuesday morning. I tried not to bring a lot of expectations of what the guy would be like. I was kind of surprised to find out he looks a LOT like me. Same age, hair line, frown lines, I could go on.

We met with the engineers. We decided to go with the local guy's that were recommended by a construction company on the island. The companies name is Advanced Engineering and the principle engineer is named Gabe Del Porto. Clark wanted to check that the bid was based on a complete scope of work to finish the project. I got the feeling that he was making sure I was doing my job correctly. I didn't mind that, after all, he's got a lot riding on me. We went to the county offices to do basically the same thing We also got a person to talk to at their public works offices. That person is in charge of collecting about twenty one thousand dollars of the permit fee's that we were quoted.

On my previous trip down I had to get the plans stamped by both Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District and the Iron House Sanitary District. These approvals are required before you can apply to the county for a permit. When I spoke with the woman at Iron House she told me that they already carried that address on their books. I asked her to research their history and she told me that there was a house on the site up until 2003. It had apparently been demolished sometime after that. The upshot was that they gave me a waiver from the eighty eight hundred dollar fee that they charge for new construction. With the client standing next to me at the Contra Costa County public works counter I used that information to get a waiver for the twenty one thousand dollar fee they were charging for new "raw" land construction. That made a good impression on the client.

We went to Oakland that afternoon to see American Steel. It's an old steel warehouse that my friend Dan Das Mann has taken over and turned into a three quarter of a million square foot studio specializing in art metal fabrication. It's equipped with a 10 ton trolley crane in each bay. Our steel fabricator, Steve Valdez, has his shop set up there. If you start out with a complete set of building plans with everything detailed you can get any competent guy with a tool belt to build for you. When your doing a design/build you need the kind of creative thinking that an artisan brings to the table.
Clark was deeply impressed by both the scope and scale of activity that happens at American Steel. Just before he left to catch a flight home he told me "I'll be back in October, have a house ready for me." That kind of faith made a good impression on me.