What a ~$1.8M buildout teaches about owner’s representation

Before Just Float delivered a single float session, the company spent ~18 months in construction on a ~$1.8M buildout. Just Float was co-founded and led by our principal, and on that project he served as owner’s representative and project leader: budget, contractors, design, change orders, payments, schedule, quality, commissioning and every technical problem in between.

The site itself was chosen with the same discipline: ~40 properties evaluated online, four visited in person, and a ~3,000 sq ft facility selected, with the lease negotiated alongside counsel. What follows is what that project teaches an owner about the role.

Every discipline draws its own building

The project coordinated architecture, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire, life safety, acoustics, automation and water sanitation. Each discipline engineer produces drawings that are correct on their own terms. The owner needs them to be correct together.

Our principal was the central integration point among the discipline engineers, responsible for cross-discipline compatibility and for documentation fit for city submittal. On most projects, nobody is paid to see the whole building at once. That is the owner’s representative’s job, and it is the reason the role exists.

The paperwork is the project

Bids were solicited and compared, pricing negotiated, scopes defined and contractors selected. Trades were scheduled, meetings run, submittals reviewed, change orders managed, work inspected, punch lists closed and payments approved. Licensed commercial crews performed the credential-required work under our principal’s coordination, and he did some of the hands-on construction himself.

None of that is glamorous, and all of it is leverage. A payment approved before the work is inspected is leverage given away. Our rule is simple: inspection before payment, and every change order managed, never absorbed.

Regulators need an education, not a fight

Two moments from the buildout carry most of the lesson. The city rejected an ADA-approved design, which forced a redesign and a delay of ~three months. Separately, health inspectors initially sought to regulate the float suites like a spa, with continuous-flow requirements. Our principal educated the inspectors on the systems and helped obtain a variance.

An approval is not a finish line until every authority having jurisdiction has signed. Build time for them into the schedule, and bring regulators the engineering early, in terms they recognize.

Design for the tenth year

The owner lives in the building long after the contractors leave, and the decisions that matter most in year ten are made in design:

• Tanks elevated for heater replacement, with custom mounting for pumps, filters and sanitation equipment.
• Recessed, sloped suites for leak containment, with drains behind tanks and showers.
• Salt-proofing, epoxy wall coatings and specialized wallboard.
• Staggered-stud acoustic assemblies and vibration-isolation pads under the tanks.

The same thinking applies to how a building behaves. Our principal defined the operational logic for temperature, lighting, music and the sequence of each session, and specialist controls programmers implemented it. Decide how the building behaves before an integrator builds it.

What owners should take from it

• Put one person on your side of the table. Every other party on a project represents someone else’s interest.
• Pay against inspected work. Payment is the owner’s strongest lever. Spend it last.
• Schedule the regulators. Approvals take time, and an informed inspector is an ally.
• Decide maintainability in design. The cheapest moment to make a building serviceable is before it is built.

The building that came out of those ~18 months housed the world’s largest flotation therapy center throughout our principal’s tenure, through May 2023, with 11 float suites.