When you are laying out your plans for your home, don’t forget to add closets and areas to keep all of the occasionally used items such as seasonal decorations and party needs.  If you like to entertain, you will surely need to have a place to keep your nice tablecloths, napkins, glassware,and serving pieces.  If you like to decorate, like my friend, you will need an ample storage area for fun decorations.  Some people set aside an area with large shelves and use crates and containers to organize their items.  In other homes we have arranged ways to hang up wreaths and decorations on the walls to keep them from getting crushed.

Storage rooms for holiday decorations are best if they are heated and air conditioned. There’s nothing worse than opening up the box of Christmas candles and finding out they have melted into a shape that would be more appropriate for Halloween.

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday Season!

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.

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Well, I don’t just guess. That can get you into trouble. In the early design stages, I depend on some rough cost-per-square-foot rule of thumb. I discuss how to calculate the square footage in my book, Designing Your Perfect House in some detail. This rule of thumb guideline will work for the initial preliminary design to at least get you in the ballpark. But before the work of finalizing the documents can be done, I talk to a builder who builds houses at the level my clients are expecting and ask him to give me a calculated estimate based on my preliminary plans, site plan, and elevations.

This is still not a finite figure that can be used for a construction contract. But it is better than the early guess based on the cost per square foot. I ask him to give me a “bracketed” number. The low number is an amount that the cost of the house could not possibly be lower than without doing surgery (reductions or redesign) on the plan. The higher number is the amount we are unlikely to exceed unless we start selecting exotic things. This budget range could be as much as $200,000 on a large house. But I’ve found this to be helpful for my clients. If we are at the top of their budget with the builder’s low-end number, then it’s back to the drawing board. If it’s within the range, then we proceed, always cautiously, with our eyes open. If the budget is well above even the high number, which really never happens, we go have a party.

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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.

The post Homebuilding – Early Cost Estimates appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

Hawaii is over five thousand miles from my office. But when a relative of a previous client called me from Tokyo and asked if I would be interested in doing a project in Hawaii, how could I say “no?” I met the property owners at the beachfront site on Oahu and we agreed to work together. These days, with e-mail, digital cameras, the internet, and overnight delivery, moving information long distances is easy. I made many trips to Hawaii for design meetings, site visits, and contractor meetings, but the process went along in much the same way as it would have if it had been an hour’s drive from my office.

When I travelled to the islands, I would often stay for a week or so. I took along my laptop and worked on my other projects while not attending to the business of the Hawaii project. So my local work progressed as it normally would. The whole experience was great fun, especially the two week trip to Bali to buy antique doors, stone carvings, and other items, as well as study Balinese architecture. My client wanted a Bali themed design. I learned a lot about Balinese architecture through reading, but this first-hand look at some of the iconic buildings, resorts, and the traditions that generated the distinctive forms were tremendously valuable.

A builder can not work at such long distances as easily. His work requires much closer contact and day to day management. But an architect does a lot of his work in his office or studio and only needs periodic visits. I have designed houses in many states and I am always looking forward to new and interesting challenges and experiences. So please feel free to contact me if you are thinking of designing and building a house anywhere at all, especially if it’s a warm, tropical climate. We’ll plan our site meetings for the wintertime.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

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.

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Probably the most important thing must do before even looking for floor plans is to write a “program” for your new house. Before architects begin a design, we write out a list of the required spaces or rooms, target room sizes, and desired characteristics and features for each room. This list is called the program. It is essential your goal for your house design. Lesson Eight in my book, Designing Your Perfect House, we discuss how to do this properly and effectively.

Writing a program is important so you will stay on track in your house plan search. If you don’t know your goal, you’ll never know if you’ve achieved it. With a good program, you will be able to choose between plans on a more detailed basis than simply how many bedrooms there are. For example, if you list in your program that you need morning sun in the kitchen, you will focus on floor plans that provide that and choose a building site that will allow the house to have the proper orientation that will place the kitchen on the eastern side of the lot so as to allow the morning sun to shine in.

This is simply one example. there are many other criteria you should be thinking about. If you develop a good program, you’ll end up with a good house.

Please look through the pages that explain my book , Designing Your Perfect House, and see if it might be helpful to you.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

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.

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Many electricians base their price on the number of junction boxes they install. Each switch, each electrical outlet and each light fixture counts as one box. So if you add an overhead light and a wall switch, this counts as two boxes. Usually, the location of the boxes does not matter. It is the number of boxes that is critical to your homebuilding costs.

The preventive medicine to avoid this cost calamity is to have a good, well though through electrical plan drawn up prior to the builder preparing his price. Your architect or residential designer can help you with this. They can show you what you need and help you avoid “over-lighting” your house. Over-lighting is a real peril and can really add homebuilding costs quickly. Many times I see people put a light above the vanity in a powder room and also include a ceiling light. In real life, the light above the mirror will light the small powder room quite sufficiently. The ceiling light will never be used. Be sure every light is essential before you toss it in to the plan. These things add up. If you really want to control your homebuilding costs, you need to place lights with care.

Also, try to avoid over-controlling the lights. It’s easy to start adding switches to control every light from every entry point to a room. Try to be prudent about this. You will want to provide what is called a lighted “path of travel.” This is a path that takes you through the house with switches along the way so you can turn on the light ahead of you and turn it off after you have passed. A simple example is a hallway with a switch at each end that operates the hall light. Rooms like dining rooms that have two entry points should have one of the light in the room operated from both entry points. These are called three-way switches in the construction world. But the other lights in the dining room do not have to have three way switches. Only place those switches near the primary entry point. If you come into the room from the other direction, you will have to walk across the room if you want to turn on the other lights, but you will save a lot of construction money by using this switching strategy in every room and you also won’t end up with a bunch of unsightly switches all across your walls.

Control your lighting impulses and prepare a good lighting plan and you will gain control over your homebuilding costs.

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.

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