General contractor search vs planning with architect and tendering - general procedure?

What’s on my mind: - Rapid offer preparation/ballpark figure - Price range - Description of construction services - Organizational effort - Design freedom vs "being squeezed into a grid" - Own contributions - Trades are well coordinated and possibly aligned with the architect

The offer preparation results in no more than a ballpark figure at the decision-making stage, but it cannot and should not be more than that. The price range is quite simple: "total house budget minus must-have budget = nice-to-have budget." Non-load-bearing interior walls are practically freely "movable." Own contributions must be taken into account, i.e. choosing the right stage of development. With non-local providers, it regularly happens that subcontractors have to be brought in who have not trained with the team. That’s why you leave the Dome in Cologne and the Michel in Hamburg.

Okay, Papierturm tells more.

After I got a bit of a wake-up call last year, we bought a plot of land. What we didn’t yet know at the time was what specifications the development plan imposed. Although it was oddly worded (for us laymen in construction), after consulting the building authority it was actually quite straightforward. Positioning of the house on the plot, maximum height of the eaves side, roof shape and roof pitch, brick facade were prescribed – and that there was to be no knee wall / dwarf wall (neither in the attic nor on the upper floor). As the (by the way very friendly gentleman from the building authority) said: roof slopes must go all the way down to the ground.

So initially, to get a feeling, we worked on several things simultaneously. Whether that was wise or rather unfortunate, I don’t know.
1. We dealt very intensively with which rooms we really need. And which we don’t.
2. We looked at a huge number of houses. From friends, family, as well as model home parks. Primarily to get a feel for room dimensions, pathways, and light. Always asking: How does it work in everyday life? Would we manage? What bothers us? What is needed in daily life?
3. I worked my way into the topics of technology and terminology.
4. We also (even though the positioning was predetermined) considered how to integrate the plot and the house well. Example: On one side we have an amazing view over a valley. So we took that into account in the rough room planning (where roughly should which living spaces be? Where does the staircase go? Where utility rooms like the laundry room? Along with that: windows!).
5. I talked with everyone in my environment who had ever built before. What major planning problems did they have?

So. From there it got wild. And we also began some wrong turns on our part:
6. We then browsed through many (many, many) catalogs and found floor plans that we really liked and seemed like a good starting point for us. With a handful of technical wishes (air-to-water heat pump, usable attic; both of which I don’t find particularly unusual) we then went to a handful of general contractors and tried to get a fitting offer from those catalog floor plans (due to the development plan requirements, this meant almost always converting to 2 full stories, changing the roof shape, partly also reducing the standard ceiling height so that the eaves side would not become too high).
7. That totally failed. Only one single general contractor submitted an offer that complied with the development plan. Often a knee wall was planned. Wishes were partly ignored silently (example: unusable attic), partly openly ignored (air-to-air heat pump in the offer). Regardless of whether it was about the house dimensions (development plan!) or the wishes, it always said “can be changed later.” I knew that from my point 5 above, it led to sometimes enormous additional costs in the environment.
7a. Some appointments with certain general contractors were downright frustrating. Example: We already took a standard floor plan as a basis, then suddenly a completely different one was calculated with completely different window and room arrangements that didn’t fit the plot at all. With the result that for example facing the valley on the upper floor there wasn’t a single window in the offer plan.
8. On recommendation, we then came to an independent architect here in the region who took over performance phases 1-4 for a fixed price (and who was not pre-armed with a plan or drawing from us – his approach was to look at the plot, talk, and develop together), and also handled communication with the general contractors (including submission of desired equipment – a long list). As written in the other thread, it then worked out: We received relatively comparable offers (there were still slight deviations in the different construction specification descriptions for elements we did not specify). Also, now almost all offers complied with the development plan since they were based on our (the architect’s) drawing.

How good or bad our path will be, I don’t know. Let’s wait and see until the house is standing. Since the architect has meanwhile saved us significantly more than he has cost (see other thread), and also saved us from a few pitfalls, we are currently in a fairly positive mood.

and that there must be no knee wall / dwarf wall (neither in the attic nor in the upper floor). As the (by the way very friendly gentleman from the building authority) said: roof slopes must go down to the floor.

Attempted to phrase it kindly and understandably for laypeople, but factually incorrect. Even where the development plan excludes what some people and in some regions call a "dwarf wall" knee wall, it cannot actually prohibit a dwarf wall. In many areas, historically / culturally developed, there are practically only knee walls or only dwarf walls, and thanks to internal German migration, people accustomed to knee walls move to dwarf wall areas and vice versa again and again. Understandably, this has led to the popular misconception that these are just different names for the same thing. However, in truth, they are two opposite approaches to the same purpose (avoiding dirty corners in inhabited attics). Building officials should be able to distinguish these two instruments; otherwise, a "citizen-friendly statement phrased in normal language" produces a legally incorrect impression. You may therefore definitely construct dwarf walls in knee-wall-free attic spaces.

So. From there it got wild. And some wrong paths from our side also began:

I am glad that you also found help from an architect. However, a building consultant like me would certainly have sufficed to distill a benchmark that would rightly put the providers back on track. Even when I was not yet allowed a signature, the path could be found thanks to my avatar (if looked at carefully) and with the help of googling my external contributions including the quotation marks around their titles.

Both approaches have their advantages and justification for existence. What is "better" can only be evaluated based on a goal.

I will simplify once. If you can confirm the following three statements, a catalog house will be the more affordable option for you to achieve your goal.
Statement 1: My requirements for the house are actually quite "normal." I have seen many houses and thought I could live well in them. People do not reflect to me that my wishes are extraordinary.
Statement 2: For me, a house must be above all value-retaining and practical. I do not want to spend money on non-functional details. So far, I have had no particular interest in architecture. I can achieve details I like later with furnishings, colors, and decorations.
Statement 3: I have a property which, due to its format, building conditions, location, and geological characteristics, does not pose particular challenges for building a standardized house.