A Truly Custom House

Make It Perfect

I call my book Designing Your Perfect House. The idea is that Your perfect house is different from the next persons’s perfect house. What you want your house to be can and should be unique to you and your family. My message today is this. Don’t be afraid to express your feelings. Don’t be shy about letting the builder know what you expect and how you want things to turn out. 

One example of this came up the other day on one of my projects. We have designed a Country French style house with a blend of stone and brick as the exterior materials. Within the stone portions of the house, the brick is used for window sills, window headers and the arches in door and window openings. My client has expressed only one objection when we viewed examples of this style. She could not stand it when the occasional dark brick was used in these brick detail areas. She had a good point, because the dark brick tended to look like a missing tooth. So the special instructions to the builder were that he could use the general run of the shades of brick in the brick wall areas, but where the bricks were the detail sills and headers, he had to discard any black or dark bricks.

This may seem like a petty or inconsequential detail. But in my client’s pursuit of Her Perfect House, it was critically important. My point is that you are investing a lot of money and effort in the task of creating Your Perfect House. Take the opportunity to get it right. And only you can truly define what “right” is.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.