Design-Build
One contract, one blueprint, one team
We take a client sketch, a photo of a building you liked, or nothing at all, and turn it into a set of drawings you approve before a single footing gets dug.
Chapter 01
Start from a sketch, a photo, or nothing at all
Some clients hand us a napkin drawing. Some hand us a photo of a building three towns over and say make it work like that one. Some have nothing but a property line and a budget number. All three start the same way here: our in-house architectural staff turns whatever you bring into real schematics, so you are never paying an outside architect to translate your own idea back to you.
If you already have stamped drawings from someone else, we can build from those instead. Design-build is the option, not the requirement.
Cardinal Construction design-build project, a metal-panel commercial building
Workflow and facility layout before aesthetics
Before we talk finishes, we talk about how people and material actually move through the building. Where trucks load, where staff clock in, where the public walks versus where the crew walks. A warehouse laid out around how the last tenant used it is a bad fit for how you will use it, and that mismatch is expensive to fix after the concrete is poured.
We ask specific questions here: what does a normal Tuesday look like inside this building, and where does it currently bottleneck.
We ask what did not work in your last building
If you have operated out of a building before, whether owned or leased, it taught you something about what you need next. Not enough dock doors. Break room too far from the floor. Office windows that face the wrong exposure for a Wisconsin summer. We build a running list of those pain points at the start of the project specifically so the new design does not repeat them.
Nothing gets built until you approve the blueprint
The drawings go back and forth until you sign off on them, and only then does anyone on the field staff pick up a shovel. That sequence protects your budget: change orders after ground-breaking cost real money, and the whole point of design-build under one roof is catching the changes on paper instead.
From there the same team that drew it builds it, so nothing gets lost in a handoff between an architect's office and a general contractor's office.
Cardinal Construction, One-year labor warranty on every project. Call (920) 888-2251.