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My parents owned anf ran a jewelry store for 35 years, nearly their entire working life. My Dad was a master jeweler, goldsmith, sculptor. Among many things,

My parents owned anf ran a jewelry store for 35 years, nearly their entire working life. My Dad was a master jeweler, goldsmith, sculptor. Among many things, they would string and re-string pearls for folks. Usually family heirlooms that they wanted to keep, but also be able to wear and not fear they'd break and fall all.over the floor. After years of doing that, and also buying raw oearls from overseas, stranding them, and then selling them, my Dad asked the supplier, do yoi guys do stranding? Yes, yes they did, for free. He could have been ordering pre-strung pearls for the same price the whole time. Stranding pearls takes time.

bombcar 4y ago
One of the questions I like to ask contractors before beginning work is "what changes would make this cheaper/easier for you?" Often simple things like moving a planned wall an inch or switching the location of something can make it vastly easier; or there will be things they can get preassembled or done for free. And sometimes the factory building whatever has a giant machine that can easily do what would take you quite a long time to do by hand.
- lkois 4y ago
  I used to work in a place that assembled machines based on old designs that rarely got reviewed, since if it ain't broke don't fix it. When working on one particular unit, I found that they would order a bunch of plastic panels, cut to size, and some with precut holes. And others with secondary drawings, instructing us how to drill out a bunch of holes ourselves. Sometimes not even all the holes, just a few, in addition to the precut. When I asked why we didn't just ask the supplier to cut out ALL the holes, I basically got a shrug. So I merged the secondary drawings and sent them to the supplier, and the assembly team never wasted time on that nonsense again.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  It’s funny. They seem to be two kinds of contractors out there. Type one will push as hard as possible for you to design things in a way that makes it easier for them. To the point where there are all sorts of design compromises like a beam in the middle of your kitchen. The second type is the one who wants to deliver exactly the vision of the client, to the point where they are adding a huge amount of complexity to perfectly meet unreasonable demands.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This is usually where the general contractor or the architect (if you don't have one, then that means you are that role) steps in to help insure the project is as it should be.
  - halgir 4y ago
    In my experience, contractors will build exactly what I ask for without challenging unimportant details that would have made things easier. My interpretation is that because they have so much internalized knowledge, they assume that I obviously know many of the same things that they do, and that I have already considered any such changes and actively decided against them. I've since learned to do what was suggested above. It's been a valuable lesson for myself to question just how much of my internalized "obvious" knowledge about technical matters is apparent to clients and partners. Never assume.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - lazide 4y ago
      Also, they can charge more if it’s harder (usually), as long as it’s obvious to other contractors it would be hard too. If the low bidder gave that bid because they didn’t notice, then also lulz - tends to weed out the problem children. Really painful for the customer and said contractor though.
      - RHSeeger 4y ago
        As an example of the opposite of this... We had a pond put in a number of years back. The guys that did the work laid out what they would be building, showed us everything, and we agreed on it. While digging out the earth for the pond, they ran into a boulder not too far underground. They spend about half a day fighting with the boulder, seeing if they could break it up, etc; whatever they could do to get it out of the way. When we went out to chat with them and see how the work was going, they told us about the rock and how it's being difficult. We told them we'd be fine with them changing the shape of the pond to just work around the boulder. They were happy about this because it made their lives much easier. The cost of the creation of the pond was set before they started work on it. They gained nothing by trying really hard to create what they said they would; other than the fact that they did a good job and had happy clients. But they spend the time trying to deal with the problem without any real complaints (the talk about it being difficult was a casual chat, not them coming to us to complain).
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
It's funny how that works. I have a small electronics/firmware consulting side business. I used to make up wire harnesses for a customer, buying the wire, cutting to length and stripping insulation, crimping on connectors, etc. It was slow and my quality wasn't the greatest. Then I looked around and found a company that would provide me the correct length of wire cut to size with the right terminals crimped in place all for less than I could buy just the bulk wire in the first place with no setup costs. Minimum order, IIRC was 100 pieces, which is peanuts. Blew my mind! At least I only struggled for a month or two before realizing that there had to be an easier way :-)

bombcar 4y ago

One of the questions I like to ask contractors before beginning work is "what changes would make this cheaper/easier for you?" Often simple things like moving a planned wall an inch or switching the location of something can make it vastly easier; or there will be things they can get preassembled or done for free. And sometimes the factory building whatever has a giant machine that can easily do what would take you quite a long time to do by hand.

lkois 4y ago
I used to work in a place that assembled machines based on old designs that rarely got reviewed, since if it ain't broke don't fix it. When working on one particular unit, I found that they would order a bunch of plastic panels, cut to size, and some with precut holes. And others with secondary drawings, instructing us how to drill out a bunch of holes ourselves. Sometimes not even all the holes, just a few, in addition to the precut. When I asked why we didn't just ask the supplier to cut out ALL the holes, I basically got a shrug. So I merged the secondary drawings and sent them to the supplier, and the assembly team never wasted time on that nonsense again.
thehappypm 4y ago
It’s funny. They seem to be two kinds of contractors out there. Type one will push as hard as possible for you to design things in a way that makes it easier for them. To the point where there are all sorts of design compromises like a beam in the middle of your kitchen. The second type is the one who wants to deliver exactly the vision of the client, to the point where they are adding a huge amount of complexity to perfectly meet unreasonable demands.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is usually where the general contractor or the architect (if you don't have one, then that means you are that role) steps in to help insure the project is as it should be.
- halgir 4y ago
  In my experience, contractors will build exactly what I ask for without challenging unimportant details that would have made things easier. My interpretation is that because they have so much internalized knowledge, they assume that I obviously know many of the same things that they do, and that I have already considered any such changes and actively decided against them. I've since learned to do what was suggested above. It's been a valuable lesson for myself to question just how much of my internalized "obvious" knowledge about technical matters is apparent to clients and partners. Never assume.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lazide 4y ago
    Also, they can charge more if it’s harder (usually), as long as it’s obvious to other contractors it would be hard too. If the low bidder gave that bid because they didn’t notice, then also lulz - tends to weed out the problem children. Really painful for the customer and said contractor though.
    - RHSeeger 4y ago
      As an example of the opposite of this... We had a pond put in a number of years back. The guys that did the work laid out what they would be building, showed us everything, and we agreed on it. While digging out the earth for the pond, they ran into a boulder not too far underground. They spend about half a day fighting with the boulder, seeing if they could break it up, etc; whatever they could do to get it out of the way. When we went out to chat with them and see how the work was going, they told us about the rock and how it's being difficult. We told them we'd be fine with them changing the shape of the pond to just work around the boulder. They were happy about this because it made their lives much easier. The cost of the creation of the pond was set before they started work on it. They gained nothing by trying really hard to create what they said they would; other than the fact that they did a good job and had happy clients. But they spend the time trying to deal with the problem without any real complaints (the talk about it being difficult was a casual chat, not them coming to us to complain).

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

It's funny how that works. I have a small electronics/firmware consulting side business. I used to make up wire harnesses for a customer, buying the wire, cutting to length and stripping insulation, crimping on connectors, etc. It was slow and my quality wasn't the greatest. Then I looked around and found a company that would provide me the correct length of wire cut to size with the right terminals crimped in place all for less than I could buy just the bulk wire in the first place with no setup costs. Minimum order, IIRC was 100 pieces, which is peanuts. Blew my mind! At least I only struggled for a month or two before realizing that there had to be an easier way :-)