Two Decisions. A Well Built Home and a Home that Improves Your Daily Life. All decisions are made months before the framing of your home and thus must be protected through the home’s pricing, permitting and construction.
Design around observed routines, not room labels
He continued to explain how his family members spent their time during the day, and how he had arrived at the various functions on the floor plan. I continued to explain several potential problems with the floor plan that I had not thought of, for example a mudroom 18 feet from the cars in the garage would get little use. In 20 years coats would be dripping off the dining chairs.
Programming interviews test for specific programming abilities. All good programming interviews are highly specific. They are usually hypothetical in nature. The best way to test someone’s ability to solve problems is to give them hypothetical problems and see how they can think on their feet to come up with solutions. The programming interviews for the graduate students that I worked with were very good. We started off by asking specific questions about the typical behaviors of people in a household. For example, the typical person washes their clothes as soon as they get home or they leave them in a pile on the floor for a few days. We asked where they would wash them, where they would dry them, and how they would fold them and put them away in their closet.
Adjacency does more work than area
Rather than testing the number of rooms in a floor plan, test the floor plan against travel distance and sight lines. A great pantry is within 2 steps of a range. A large storage space around the corner of a room is not as valuable as a great pantry. A guest room that is on the same wall as a stairwell is a problem that cannot be solved with trim. Cut 80 sq. Ft. From formal space that is rarely used instead of widening a circulation path.
Choose a builder whose process matches the complexity
I look for a home builder before I look at their homes. I am trying to build a unique home on a small lot with very unusual architecture. I have specified a long list of specialty products. So, I want to know how the home builder handles unusual situations with the homes they build. Then I ask them for an example of a time when everything went wrong with a home they built and how they fixed the problems with that home. If they can’t come up with at least one situation where everything went wrong with a home they built, then they haven’t built enough homes.
- Who writes the schedule, how often it is updated, and whether subcontractors receive it
- How change orders are priced, and whether labor impact is included or added later
- The ratio of self-performed work to subcontracted trades, and how that affects accountability
- Whether the superintendent running your project is the one who ran the reference project
- How the builder handles design coordination when the architect’s detail conflicts with field conditions
The vast majority of problems encountered with a house and how you deal with them is how you deal with them as a Home Builder and thus form the basis of a good Home Builder. Test their responses by asking for an example of when everything went wrong with a house that they had built and how they had dealt with it in the completion of that house. If they cannot provide an example or two then they have not built enough houses to have encountered problems with a house on a number of occasions and thus are not a good Home Builder.
Budget in a way that survives contact with reality
By the time the framing of your home is complete a lot of money has been spent to protect the very expensive finishes that you specified for your home with a lot of emotional attachment months prior to. So by the time the framing of your home is complete all of the money that you spent was for a very well constructed home of high quality but in the wrong order and with a lot of compromises that would have detracted from the home’s functionality and daily living comfort.
| Stage | Typical pricing method | Cost certainty | Cost of a change |
| Feasibility and site study | Square foot ranges by tier | Low | Negligible |
| Schematic design | Assembly-based estimate | Moderate | Drafting time only |
| Construction documents | Trade bids with allowances | Good | Redesign plus re-bid |
| Post-permit construction | Change order pricing | High for base scope | Material, labor, and schedule |
Contingency belongs to the owner
Owner Contingency Funds and Builder Contingency Funds should be two separate funds. Most builders of new homes list out typical site unknowns and most soil conditions fall into a few categories, typically rock, poor soils, and hidden utility lines. Soil conditions reports typically cost a lot less than a potential foundation redesign for a custom home.
Build the parts you feel every day
The two major comfort issues in new construction of homes are the envelope of the house and the MEP systems of the home. How well does a home hold air? Are the rooms of a home at equal temperatures throughout the day? Does a home have a stale odor, typically in February? Most of these comfort issues are not visible so they are typically some of the first items to be ‘value engineered’ or reduced from a budget for a new home.
In new construction of homes, resilient sound barriers between bathrooms, bedrooms and media rooms can be effectively constructed within the frame of new homes by using double stud assemblies of solid, sound insulated interior partitions. In addition, resilient sound channels can be placed within the studs between adjacent bathrooms. Isolated HVAC ducts can also be framed into new homes and built prior to finish work of expensive drywall, typical of most new homes under construction. If you are comparing builders of Charlotte custom homes, favor the ones that test the envelope of a house for air leakage before drywall is installed over the insulation.
Protect design intent through construction
All sets of drawings for a house are simply a bunch of paper. Typically, a lot of people are involved in building one house. Thus, the best way to ensure that your house is built just the way you want it, is to make a list of all the major decisions, and then list out the enforcement points for each of the decisions that you have decided on for your house.
- Mockups for anything with a visual tolerance, such as stone, stucco texture, stain color, garden finishes, exterior materials, and key decorative details.
- A pre-drywall walk with the architect, builder, and owner present at the same time to confirm smart home wiring, lighting, outlets, garden connections, and other critical installations.
- Written approval before any substitution, including hardware, lighting, smart home devices, garden materials, fixtures, and decorative finishes.
There’s no reason that good homes have to cost as much as people make them out to cost. The cost of a good home is the cost of fixing the mistakes of the decision making process. Therefore, you have to make decisions and then stick to them and defend them.
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