VirginBuilder

Architects

Oh yes, another aspect of building a custom home...

So, I'll be up-front. We had a $100,000 construction budget with plans to do most of the work ourself. We were looking at somewhere between a 2,000 and 3,000 square foot house. Any contractors reading this now are laughing their butts off! Typical rates for building an average home are $100-150 a square foot. We thought we could do it, with nice environmentally friendly materials for $33-50 per square foot. I'll explain later why I'm actually not insane. We're building a far nicer house than planned, bought more tools than planned, and are still coming in close to $70 per square foot including permits, architect fees and all materials, labor, etc. This does NOT include the land price. So it can be done.

Anyway, we'd written down all of the spaces that we wanted to include in our home, and where we'd like them. Architects refer to this as "programming." As in; "You have a lot more programming for upstairs rooms than downstairs rooms." So, we had read several books, many of which are listed below. We also bought books of house plans that you can order for reasonable prices ($500-$1000.) We didn't find any that we REALLY liked and when we tried to come up with a floor-plan we ended up with a huge box of a house that would have been comfortable but not particularly attractive. We also couldn't resolve a few details. It turned out that the neighbors down the hill were architects and the wife worked from home. We liked what they had done with their house and what they had done for other clients. We hired them to "fix" our plans and resolve our layout problems. Thus began a very expensive, but ultimately more than worth it, foray into modern design.

They came back with three basic sketches. One in which they resolved the problems in our plans (and did a very nice job of) and two more that took our programming and came up with other layouts. Their taste is much more modern. However, their layouts were far nicer, didn't end up being huge boxes and would be worth far more than what we were building. So, without getting too specific, we ended up spending WAY more money than we thought we would on an architect and the engineering work, but ended up with plans for a house that would be worth almost double what we had planned. It is easy to say now, but at the time it created a LOT of stress, and made us seriously question whether we'd be able to actually finish.

posted by VirginBuilder @ 12:53 PM