How long it takes to build a house, stage by stage

It is almost everybody’s first question and it deserves an honest answer, which begins with an uncomfortable warning.

Search for "how long does it take to build a house in Colombia" and you will find round figures: eight months, ten, a year. Not one of them cites a source, a study, a survey or a method. There is no official or trade statistic in the country for the duration of building work by stage. What circulates are averages of nothing.

So I am not going to add another figure. I am going to explain the real sequence, what depends on what, which deadlines actually sit in the statutes and — most usefully — where the time really goes, which is hardly ever where people think.

Three separate clocks, and only one has a law

A house project has three stretches that behave in completely different ways, and mixing them is what produces the useless answers:

The design stretch

The architects’ fee decree describes the stages and the order they happen in. It puts no duration on them — it could not — but it does make clear what each one settles:

1. 1Outline scheme. The general layout: zones, entrances, how the rooms relate to one another. It can be done even before the final site is settled.
2. 2Concept design. Plans, sections and elevations sufficient to understand the building and to decide, with no drawings for carrying out the works.
3. 3Architectural project. All the information needed for construction to be carried out: details, specifications and coordination with the other disciplines.
4. 4Engineering designs. Structural, plumbing and drainage, electrical and gas, each with the signature the law requires.

What can be run in parallel: soil with topography, and the engineering designs with the development of the architectural project. What cannot: the sequence outline scheme → concept design → project. Each one settles questions the next takes as settled.

The permit stretch: here there are numbers

• —The 45 working days run from filing in due and proper form. An incomplete file does not start the clock.
• —The term may be extended once only, by up to half, where the size or the complexity of the project warrants it.
• —If a record of observations arrives, you have 30 working days to answer, extendable by 15.
• —Positive administrative silence operates "on the terms applied for", but never against the planning rules.

The only construction deadline that exists in law

Here is the fact nobody uses for what it is. The statutes do not say how long a house takes to build, but they do say how much time you are given to do it before the permit expires:

Read it for what it is: the only time ceiling the Colombian state has put in writing for building. It is not a statistic of duration and should not be used as one. But if your house is a new build and somebody puts a programme in front of you that brushes thirty-six months, the rule is telling you the margin is very thin.

The extension has to be applied for no later than 30 working days before expiry — working days, not calendar days — with the documentation complete and a sworn statement that the works have already begun. Anyone who remembers it the month before is already too late.

The works, by dependency instead of by month

Since there are no published durations that can be cited, what is useful is to understand the chain: what cannot start until what has finished. That much can be stated, because it is physics and building technique, not statistics.

Where the time really goes

1. The concept design that never closes

It is, by some distance, where most time is lost, and the one nobody counts because no procedure produces it. A concept design that goes back and forth six times eats up more weeks than the permit and the foundations put together.

The cause is hardly ever the architect: it is that the decision has not been taken. If there are two people in the household who want different things, the drawing is not going to resolve it.

2. The finishes decided on site

Tiling, taps, joinery, lighting. Deciding them when they already have to be installed turns every choice into a stoppage. And anything made to measure or imported has a lead time that depends on nobody on the site.

3. The change halfway through

Moving a bathroom after the slab has been poured is not an alteration: it is demolishing, redoing and testing again. And if the change affects what the permit approved, an alteration to the permit has to be applied for as well, with a timescale of its own.

4. Cash flow

It is the commonest cause of delay and the one least often named out loud. A site that stops for want of payment does not restart where it left off: labour has to be brought back, and the output of the first few weeks is never the same.

What to ask so that the programme you are given is credible

1. 1Does the programme start from signature or from the permit becoming final? They are two very different dates.
2. 2Are they calendar days or working days? On site they are usually calendar; in procedures, working days.
3. 3What does that programme assume about my decisions? A serious programme says in which week it needs you to have chosen the finishes.
4. 4What happens if it rains? It has to be stated: how many days of rain are assumed and what happens if they are exceeded.
5. 5Which activities are on the critical path? If they cannot name three, there is no programme, there is a number.
6. 6When does the permit expire? That is the real ceiling, and it determines how much margin is left for the unforeseen.

A builder who answers those six without discomfort is telling you something more important than their programme.

The honest answer

There is no national number, and whoever gives you one did not get it from anywhere. What there is: a sequence with real dependencies, a legal term of forty-five working days for the permit, and a ceiling of validity that the rule sets according to the modality.

And there is one question that can be answered from day one, which is the one that really matters: what depends on you, and when you have to decide it. On that, more than on anything else, depends how long your house takes.