Change orders, explained: why they happen and how we handle them

Change orders have a bad reputation, and most of it is earned — by contractors who bid low and rebuild their margin afterwards, once the client is committed and the walls are already open.

Used honestly, though, a change order is simply how a construction contract accommodates something nobody could have known at signing. The mechanism is fine. What matters is which of those two you are dealing with, and you can usually tell within the first one.

Concealed conditions are the first and most common: something behind a wall, under a floor or inside a chase that could not be seen when the scope was priced. Old wiring, a notched joist, a pipe run nobody filed, water damage that had been quietly happening for years.

Client-requested changes are the second, and they are the most under-acknowledged. Owners change their minds — about a finish, a layout, a fixture — and that is entirely reasonable. It is still a change order, and it should be priced as one rather than absorbed quietly and recovered somewhere less visible.

The third is a requirement that surfaces during review or inspection: a plan examiner's objection that adds work, or an inspector requiring something the filed drawings did not anticipate.

It should never be the business model. A padded-thin bid that wins the job and recovers its margin through a stream of changes after you are committed is a well-known strategy, and the tell is always the same: the original estimate was vague.

An itemised budget agreed up front is what prevents this from being viable. If every line is priced and the scope is described specifically enough that a stranger could read it and know what is included, there is nowhere for a manufactured change order to hide.

The second thing it should never be is retrospective. A change discussed verbally on site, done, and invoiced at the end is not a change order — it is a bill you never agreed to.

A change order that respects you is short and specific. It says what triggered it, what the work is, what it costs, and what it does to the schedule — and it asks for your signature before anyone proceeds.

The schedule line matters as much as the price and is routinely left off. A change that costs little but pushes a long-lead item back three weeks is not a small change, and you cannot weigh it without being told.

When something is found, work stops on that item and it is photographed. We price the fix, and where there is more than one sensible route we bring you both with the cost and the schedule impact of each — because 'do it properly' and 'do it cheaply' are sometimes both defensible and only you can decide which fits your budget.

You approve it in writing, then the work proceeds. Nothing about a change order should ever arrive as news at the end of a project, and on our jobs the final invoice contains no line you have not already seen and signed.

You cannot eliminate change orders on a renovation — nobody can see through a wall. You can dramatically reduce them, and almost all of the leverage is in the weeks before construction.

A thorough existing-conditions survey, an investigative opening or two in the riskiest places, a coordinated drawing set, and decisions on finishes made before rather than during construction will remove most of what would otherwise become a change. The rest is what the contingency line is for, and a budget without one is not cheaper — just less honest.