Doubtingly Questionable

A number of times I've started writing a post and became disillusioned with the HVAC design marketplace and gave up. Things never got too bad but there were far too any times when it seemed like I wasn't sure if I'd be working in couple weeks. I guess it was fortunate the slide down the well of diminishing workload has bottomed into flat valley.

The two highrise residential projects mentioned in my last post are still holding after reaching the Design Development issue milestone. One was to restart in January and the other in February but neither has returned to active status. The highrise student residence project is still searching for funding repeatedly. The midrise student housing project has made it to permit review and is moving forward to construction. Good news is that it turned out to be about 200 residences instead of just over 100.

An aggravating development over the last few months is the increase in plan changes that seem to have no useful benefit. Mostly it has centered around enlarged unit plans for the residence types. They are rotated 90 or 180 degrees on the plan or the plan changesto a mirror-image version. No one can seem to give a reason for the change other thah "it was decided to make the change.

Another aggravation stems from a really odd condition - an owner with too much money wanting to spend it on changes that are more energy efficient, a good thing, or modifying spaces to combine rooms or split them up. We have finally started asking for additional fees (We didn't do so previously since the architect wasn't going to hit up the owner for more money but the frequent changes are simply too frequent. Think we're on ASI-18 for a deduct or add change.)

Aggravation Number 3: A client needs a quick turnaround on a tenant finish remodel of about 14,000sf swapping one techie company for another - both under a downsizing process. Mechanically it was pretty easy to do. Move a few diffusers, rebalance a few terminal zones, add another air conditioner to the expanded server room. Did a survey of the new site one afternoon, got to see their existing space the next day and made all the changes the day afterward. Where's the aggravation? Seems like no one bothered to tell us they were rearranging they 70-80 cubicles being left behind by the former tenant including power poles. Further, the former tenant had made changes to their cube farm over the last five years and did not document power circuiting. End result is that we'll end up a third short of fee and a couple days behind schedule since the electrical designer has to do a lot of leg work to get thing right on the plans.

Yeah, I'm whining about minor problems. Got a job so shut up. True enough. There is future work ahead. We have several projects awaiting start-up one of which I think we have a 100KSF five floor office building with a low flr-to-flr height that is part of a local redevelopment project. I though we had lost that project but I suspect there was some pull by the architect and mechanical contractor to get us involved. If not, we're likely working with a mech contractor trying to get the design-build package. I'm probably making this out to be worse than it really is and I'm getting off track.