Archi-Dinamica Architects, LLC

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The first meeting started fine ... I explained that I wanted to keep the original 4 bay barge board cottage and the 2 bay barge board kitchen cottage as they are historic .. but the addition between the two buildings was not in good shape and that part could be totally demo'ed and redone and that I would like to see if there was a way to utilize the upstairs in the 4 bay creole cottage. I explained that I did not want to make the house a lot larger, actually the overall footprint should stay the same or a touch smaller. But one thing I def. needed was a rework of the front stoop so that I could go to the city for a variance .. I needed to add approx. 6" to the width to allow for a WheelChair Incline Lift and that would require a variance. I asked for those details to be available as soon as possible as the variance group only meets once or twice a month and it sometimes takes a while to get on the docket. He was to take the dimensions of the current houses and land and work from there. First pass he came back with a drawing that showed the kitchen cottage as well as the addition demo'ed and replaced with a building that was 30-40% larger .. Which I was not wanting. We marked up the original drawing and he was supposed to come back the next week with the markups incorporated. Well here started the problems ... next week he didn't show on the appointed date .. I called and he had to reschedule for the next week .. showed up that week and 1/2 of the mark-ups had not been incorporated. He was only bringing ISO size drawings (11"x14") which are fine for checking over all layout but not the details for these check prints. Everytime he showed up there were at least 1/3 of the markup's not incorporated and it would take two or more appts for him to show. So what should of been 4 weeks to get the floorplan laid out became 8-12 weeks .. once we agreed on the overall floor plan he was supposed to have a month to develop the more detailed drawing .. well that became 6 weeks .. and then there were still errors .. I even sent him the details from Ikea on the kitchen and those were not incorporated properly. 8 months later I was still working with ISO size drawings but it looked like we had enough details to go out for bid so we met and agreed to go with the current drawings .. and that is when I made my biggest error .. I cut him a check .. all that was supposed to be left was him to now print me a full size set of drawings and to print out the details on the stoop and drop them off the next day. Haven't heard from him since. I finally took my PDF copy and had it printed larger and then found that he had room dimensions wrong, he even had building elevations wrong. So if you are into babysitting your architect, calling him weekly to make sure he will make his meetings, and you want to do all your own measurements (by the way I had given him actual interior measurements of the buildings including cutting a hole in the ceiling to get the original ceiling height.) and double check that your architect uses the actual measurements .. go for it .. but I will never use him again.

Roland was our second architect. He delivered exactly what we asked for!