Most homeowners building a custom home spend hours scrolling photos online, falling in love with images of gorgeous kitchens and spa bathrooms. Then they walk into a big box store and start making selections. Or worse, they try online shopping. Here’s the hard truth:...
When house plans are drawn to the homeowner’s actual selections, then "mistakes" during construction are prevented. That sentence may not make sense to you. Aren’t house plans drawn based on what the owner wants anyway? That’s correct. Much of what you see on a...
The typical home building process is broken in many ways, from the homeowner’s perspective. The broken parts of the process cause stress and issues for owners going through a custom home build. In this article, I’d like to bring to your attention 2 areas (of many)...
Perhaps I should say: What a homeowner truly wants for their kitchen layout should drive the design decisions for the entire house. The kitchen is the heart of the house and should be treated as such during design. Meaning, it comes first. Find out what you really...
Allowances can be a powerful way to control costs, when used the right way. Notice that I did not say reduce costs or manage the budget? The reason is that allowances are a strategy to employ, not just a list of items with a price. When used the right way, the owner...
To ensure that your money stays safe and the project moves along smoothly, it boils down to this: use a proper Schedule of Values when paying your builder. It's a standard that residential developers swear by, but most homeowners often miss out on. In this article,...
Here's a look at the nuts and bolt of employing the Schedule of Values as a STRATEGY to control costs in your home building project. You’ll want to read The Only Way to Pay Your Builder for context and definitions, before the strategy training that this article...
One principle that underlies great design is that all the elements are consistent or congruent, which creates a cohesiveness to the total picture. This is not so much about symmetry but whether the elements are cohesive (unless there is a purposeful break to said...
Here, I explore other factors related to how you view symmetry or asymmetry in design that are not talked about much, if at all. These are important aspects in design and a quick search online provides numerous articles about these concepts as they relate to home...
It is entirely possible to control costs in a custom home build, if you have these 3 must-haves in your construction contract. Once in place and used the right way, the game changes in favor of the homeowner. Otherwise, the door is open to misuse of change orders by...