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Contractors: Please Respect Your Contract Documents. Don't Write Notations On Your Original Plans.
Posted by: Kenny Tan
September 15, 2010

Construction plans are a part of the construction contract. While you may prefer to wait until the plans are finally approved for issuance of building permit before you sign the construction contract, too often owners don't want to wait. They want to have a general contractor on board and ready to proceed the minute the plans are approved. In order to do so, owners will need to have the architects prepare what are known as bidding plans on which contractors would submit their bids. 

However, these bidding plans are not plans approved by the city for purposes of issuance of building permit. But since these are plans submitted for plan checks, architects often deem them sufficiently complete for bidding purposes. The setback is that should the plans be not approved after plan checks, the proposed construction costs estimated by the general contractor would not cover changes added to the bidding plans resulting in a change in the contract price. If no contract has been signed, this is not an issue.

More often than not contract prices are based on unapproved plans. Typically when owners and general contractors sign a construction contract based on unapproved plans, the contract itself will identify the set of plans on which the price is based by referencing the date on the bidding plans. This bidding plans therefore become a part of the construction contract and must be respected as such.

In a small project where architects are not involved in the construction, sometimes contractors make notations to indicate changes to the plans which may warrant change orders. But if you want to make notations on the plans, you should make a copy of the ?clean set? and make your notations on the copy. 

It?ll be a terrible mistake to write stuff on the original plans and later make your claim for change orders on altered plans, especially if they?re oral and never put in writing on a separate piece of paper. If you have to litigate the change order claims in the future, you?ll have no ?clean set? to prove how the plans looked at the time the construction contract was signed. Don?t count on the lenders or fund control companies to keep them for a long time. They often get discarded after a while. You have no idea how much extra work you?ve created for your attorney to prove your extra work if you did that. Not too mention the risk you put on yourself that the trier of fact may not believe your testimony since you can't produce the original bidding plans. 

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