Concept

Phases

What it is

The Larossa System breaks every rehab into seven phases, numbered 0 through 6. Each one is a self-contained block of work with a clear start, clear end, and a clear deliverable before the next one begins.

  • Phase 0, Office Block: planning, utilities on, cleanout, permits.
  • Phase 1, tabula rasa: blank slate. Demo, structural work, stop the bleeding. Grounds work runs in parallel.
  • Phase 2, the gauntlet: MEP rough-ins and city inspections. Hardest phase. Blue skies after it clears.
  • Phase 3, Pregame: drywall, paint, floors. Replacements go here.
  • Phase 4, Installs: kitchen, bathroom, carpentry blocks.
  • Phase 5, Trim Out: fixtures, hardware, appliances, landscaping.
  • Phase 6, Finale: construction clean and handyman punch list.

Each phase has four internal stages: Planning, Waiting, Work in Progress, Billing/Review.

The cardinal rule is no upstream work. You never go back and do a Phase 1 job while you’re in Phase 4. Opening up finished work blows the budget and the schedule.

Why it matters

A rehab is a critical-path project with 30-something trades trying to be in the same house at the same time. Without phases it’s chaos. Plumbers tear through fresh framing, painters walk across unfinished floors, the tile guy shows up before the tub is set. Every out-of-sequence step costs money — either in rework or in one sub blaming the next.

Phases also give you the structure to run a lazy pm operation. Outcome-based payment works phase by phase: you don’t pay for “progress,” you pay for a phase that passes inspection or passes your walkthrough. The phase is the unit of accountability. That shifts the mental load off you and onto the sub who took the work.

And for anybody just starting out: a trashed house is overwhelming to look at. Phases turn an impossible pile of tasks into seven smaller piles, in order, each with a finish line.

How it shows up

sub chunking is the natural extension. Within a phase you group as many jobs as you safely can under one all-arounder contractor. Fewer handoffs, fewer management calls, better bulk pricing. The jobs menu on a typical house has 110-plus line items. Phases group them into seven buckets. Sub-chunking then groups those buckets into contractor assignments. Management drops from 30 individual relationships to five or six.

The audible is the exception that proves the rule. An audible is deliberately moving a single job from its standard phase to another phase for efficiency. Always planned, never improvised. Before calling an audible I run the trifecta: do all the right people know, is the money adjusted correctly, are the systems updated to reflect the change. If any one of those is off, the audible breaks the sequence and costs more than it saves.

The pay schedule runs phase by phase. You don’t pay for work claimed, you pay for work verified at phase completion.

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