Free tool for South Central PA homeowners
Find Out Exactly What Design-Build Could Save You
Two ways to renovate. One is significantly better.
When most people plan a home renovation, they assume the process goes like this: hire an architect to draw up the plans, then get bids from contractors to build it.
That's called design-bid-build — and it's how things have been done for decades.
The problem? The architect and contractor are separate businesses with separate incentives. The architect designs without knowing exactly what things will cost to build. The contractor bids on plans they had no hand in creating. Surprises pile up. Change orders follow.
Design-build is different.
At Reiff Design Build, design and construction live under one roof. We know what things cost before we design them, because we're the ones building them. That single fact changes everything about how a project runs.
why this matters?
When a renovation runs long, you don't just feel the frustration — you feel it financially. Maybe you're renting somewhere else while construction drags on. Maybe you're paying two mortgages. Maybe the delays mean missing a season you were counting on using the space.
Design-build compresses timelines because design and construction overlap. While we're finalizing details in one area, we can be breaking ground on another. That overlap — which isn't possible when you have two separate firms — is where the time savings come from.
It also means fewer change orders. When the person designing your home is the same person building it, there's no finger-pointing when something doesn't work. We catch problems on paper, not mid-construction.
faqs
Design-build means a single firm handles both the design and construction of your project under one contract. At Reiff Design Build, that means Josh and his team are involved from the first sketch to the final walkthrough. The alternative — hiring an architect first, then putting the plans out to bid — is called design-bid-build. It's the traditional approach, but it separates the people designing your home from the people building it, which creates gaps, delays, and change orders.
Research from the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA), based on over 200 real projects, shows design-build delivers an average 6% reduction in project costs and 33% faster overall delivery compared to design-bid-build. For homeowners, the bigger savings often come from avoided carrying costs — every month your renovation finishes earlier is a month you're not renting elsewhere or overlapping on two mortgages.
Sometimes the initial estimate looks similar to what you'd get from a standalone architect. The difference is what happens after that. With design-build, the price you agree to at the start is based on a design that has already been tested against real construction costs. With design-bid-build, the design comes first and the real price comes later — often higher than expected.
Design-build works especially well for kitchen remodels, bathroom renovations, additions, and whole-home projects where design decisions directly affect construction costs and timelines. The more complex and interconnected the work, the more value you get from having one team managing it all.
The calculator uses published benchmarks from DBIA and the Construction Industry Institute as its baseline. The numbers are estimates — they won't perfectly predict your project, because every renovation is different. Think of it as a research-backed starting point. For a real estimate specific to your home and goals, the next step is a free consultation.
