One project · in progress
A job being run, not a case study being sold.
This is an active rehabilitation in South Shore, Chicago. It is not finished, and nothing here is presented as a completed outcome.
I own the property and I am the general contractor on it. Publishing it while it is open is the point. You can see how the decisions are actually made, in the order they come up, instead of a tidy version written after the fact when every choice looks obvious.
01
The record as it stands
Counts from the project workbook. They move as the job moves.
- Location
- South Shore, Chicago
- Stage
- Active rehabilitation
- My role
- Owner and general contractor
- Scope line items
- 99
- Permit records tracked
- 6
- Draws recorded
- 7
- Field updates logged
- 13
- Risks tracked
- 13
Ownership is held by an entity I control, with Homer Reno LLC acting as the contractor. It is my own project rather than third-party client work, and it is shown as a record of method, not as a client reference.
02
Acquisition context
What the purchase decision had to answer before it was a purchase.
The building was bought to be rehabilitated, which means the purchase was never a question about the property alone. It was a question about the property plus the work, plus the time the work takes, plus what the block supports once the work is done.
The categories that had to be settled first: what the structure would allow without a redesign, what the systems would need regardless of taste, what the permitting path looked like for that kind of scope in Chicago, and how much room the number had to absorb conditions nobody can see from the street. A purchase price that only works if nothing goes wrong is not a purchase price.
I am not publishing acquisition figures, financing terms, or lender information here. Those are private to the deal.
03
Existing condition
Recording what is there before deciding what to do about it.
Before any scope is written the building gets documented as it is. Structure, envelope, roof, foundation and drainage, framing where it is visible, mechanical systems, electrical service, plumbing supply and waste, and every place where previous work was done without a permit or without much care.
The reason to be this literal is that the condition record is what every later argument gets checked against. When a cost changes six weeks in, the question is whether the condition was knowable at the start. If it was, that is on the scope. If it was not, that is a genuine change and it gets documented as one.
04
Scope development
99 line items, each one a decision that had to be made on purpose.
A scope of work is not a wish list. It is the complete set of things somebody has to do, priced, sequenced, and assigned. Writing it at the line-item level is slow and it is the single highest-return thing on a rehabilitation, because a line that does not exist on paper still exists in the building and still has to be paid for.
Each line carries what the work is, which trade owns it, what it depends on, and what it is expected to cost. Lines that are uncertain are marked as uncertain rather than smoothed into an average, because an average hides exactly the item that will blow the budget.
The scope is a living document. When conditions change, the line changes and the change is recorded. It is never quietly absorbed into another number.
05
Permit and plan coordination
6 permit records tracked as schedule items, not paperwork.
Permits and plan review are treated as work with a duration, a dependency, and an owner, in the same way framing is. Investors get hurt by permitting mostly because they treat it as an administrative afterthought and then discover that a trade cannot start for weeks.
What gets managed here: which scope items require a permit at all, which require drawings and which do not, what the review sequence is, which trades are gated behind which approval, and what the schedule looks like if a review comes back with comments rather than an approval. Requirements are confirmed with the authority having jurisdiction rather than assumed from a previous job.
Permit fees, plan review, and inspection costs are project costs and are carried in the budget from the start.
06
Budget decisions
7 draws recorded against the scope so far.
Money on this job is tracked against the scope, not against a running total. A draw is only meaningful if you can say which line items it paid for and how much of each line is left. That is the difference between knowing you have spent a lot and knowing you are over.
The recurring decisions are the ordinary ones, and they are ordinary in every rehabilitation: where finish level actually returns something and where it is spending for its own sake, what to replace now versus what will need replacing within a few years anyway, when a repair is cheaper today but more expensive across the hold, and how much contingency to protect rather than spend early.
No budget figures, unit costs, or draw amounts are published here. What is published is the method for controlling them.
07
Structural discoveries and open risks
13 risks tracked, each with an owner and a trigger.
Older buildings hold information that only demolition releases. That is not a failure of diligence, it is the nature of the work, and the correct response is to plan for the category rather than pretend to predict the instance.
Risks are written down before they happen, with what would trigger them, who owns the decision, and what the response is if they land. Framing and load path questions, moisture and drainage, buried or abandoned utilities, prior unpermitted work, and anything that could move a permit or an inspection are all on that list. Reviewing it on a schedule is how a risk stays a managed item instead of becoming an emergency.
I am not describing specific findings on this property here. The point is the discipline, not the anecdote.
08
Trade sequencing
13 field updates logged against the plan.
Sequence is where a schedule is won or lost. Trades have to arrive in an order that respects what has to be inspected before it is covered, what has to be dry before it is closed, and what one trade needs the previous one to have finished properly.
Running that well means booking trades against the real dependency chain rather than against optimism, holding a trade back when the predecessor is not genuinely complete, and logging what actually happened in the field against what was planned. The field log is what makes the next schedule better, because it records where the plan was wrong and why.
09
Inspection strategy
Passing is the baseline. Being ready is the strategy.
An inspection is a scheduled event that stops a trade sequence if it goes badly, so it is planned like one. That means knowing which inspections apply, what each inspector will look at, and confirming the work is genuinely complete and accessible before the request goes in.
A failed inspection is rarely one bad correction. It is the correction plus the rescheduling plus every trade downstream that now waits. Preparing properly is the cheapest schedule insurance on a job.
10
What this is teaching me
Written while it is still true rather than after it is safe to say.
The lesson that keeps repeating is that documentation is not overhead. Every place where I wrote the condition down, priced the line, or recorded why a decision was made, the later conversation was short. Every place where I did not, the later conversation was long and it was expensive.
The second one is that a schedule is mostly a dependency problem wearing a calendar. Dates slip because a predecessor was not really finished, not because a crew was slow.
This section will change as the job does. When something turns out differently than I expected, the honest version is more useful to you than the confident one.
If you want this run on your property, that is the conversation.
Bring the property or the target market. The first discussion is about whether the numbers work and what the construction side actually looks like.
Schedule a conversation