Infrastructure Design Group

Momenta Design Group assessed our house features and drew professional design drawing for our home remodel. We had our building permit at the City in five weeks after arriving at our final design concept.
During the course of our home design project we met at the Glashaus Design Studio in Barrio Logan which was an amazing artistic community and a perfect setting for an architecture firm.
Very happy with Rick Wright and his design and engineering staff.

I used this company to look at plans and construction on a house I purchased that needed a permit for a previously constructed addition. Rick was responsive and extremely helpful through the process. I would recommend him for engineering needs.

I had an extremely bad experience with Infrastructure Design Group, which also goes by the name of Momenta Design Group. This appears to be a one-​man operation run by a person named Rick Wright. Here is what I went experienced:
I wanted to add a 2^nd floor to my house. I had already selected the contractor to do the construction, and needed an architect to do the drawings and engineering calculations. The contractor and I had already created rough drawings that were pretty complete.
Rick Wright came to my house, looked at the drawings, made some measurements, and gave a quote of $ 6000 to create the drawings, do the engineering calculations, submit the plans to the city, and get a permit issued. I agreed to the price, and Rick sent a contract for me to sign.
The contract turned out to be misleading. The contract listed some items that he would charge extra for if I required or requested these additional services. What you have to watch out for is that these «extras» are items that are normally included in the standard fee for preparing drawings, such as the Title 24 requirements, and printing/​plotting. So what I thought was going to be a $ 6000 contract was going to be at least 25% more than that, because of these «extras» that he slips in, which normally would be included in the base price. A 25% surcharge on a $ 6000 contract is $ 1500 extra!
Anyhow, Rick got started on the project. Well, actually, he didn’t. It turns out he didn’t create the drawings. He subbed that out to somebody else. And Rick was not good at transferring all the information to the subcontractor who did the drawings. The first set of drawings was full of errors and omissions. Fortunately I had a very good contractor who went over the plans in detail. We prepared a list of about 30 changes that were needed to the first set of drawings. The list of changes could have been longer, but we limited it to the major points, figuring we’d get to the smaller errors after the 2^nd drawing release.
We sent our comments to Rick and about a week later got a 2^nd set of drawings that corrected about 7 or 8 of the errors we had noted. I found out later that Rick barely even read the comments we sent. He just forwarded them to the draftsman. The draftsman ignored most of the comments we made. When the 2^nd set of drawings was done, Rick didn’t review them. He just forwarded them from the draftsman to us.
We had several rounds of back and forth like this. We would find 15 to 25 errors in the drawings and would send detailed explanations of what needed to be fixed. Then we would get revised drawings that fixed 3 or 4 or 5 of the items we had pointed out. Meanwhile, time was dragging on.
Rick had said that it would take 10 days to 2 weeks at the most to complete the drawings and have them ready to submit to the city. We started this process in early September, and we figured that we would have drawings submitted to the city in the 3^rd week of September, and would get city approval in mid-​November. Then the plan was that construction would get started, and by the time of my daughter’s Xmas break from school, we would go on a holiday trip, and he would put the 2^nd floor on while we were out of the house.
That was a great plan, and Rick Wright shot it to pieces. With all the delays caused by him subbing out the work and not paying attention to what was going on, it was late November and we were still seeing drawings that were full of mistakes. Then Rick started complaining to me that this was taking too long. (It took a lot of self-​control to keep my temper at that point.)
The contractor said that at that point there were still a lot of errors that the city would find fault with right away, before they even completed a detailed review of the plans. But Rick refused to correct any more problems. He just submitted the plans to the city. Sure enough, in their initial review the city pointed out all of the errors that we had seen, and said that they all needed to be corrected before they did a detailed review of the plans.
This time the draftsman finally made all the corrections and resubmitted to the city. After that Rick went silent for a few weeks. Here is what was happening during that silent period. The city was requesting changes to the design — some of them quite significant. And the draftsman simply made every change that the city requested, without notifying me or the builder of these changes. He changed the design and added about $ 20k to the cost of the job! (Running out space.) It just got uglier. Never work with this guy! Very unprofessional and incompetent.