Building a Custom Home
Are your needs specialized enough to warrant building a custom-designed home? The custom home process is not for everyone. An experienced architect can aid you in making this important decision. Consider present and future needs, location and budget and allow him to help you analyze all of your requirements. To provide maximum thought to your investment, share everything you can with your architect: your thoughts, notes, sketches, photos from magazines-anything that illustrates what you like. Tell him about your routines, the way you function in your current home.
By asking wide range of question about your goals, and architect can help you to outline the scope of your project in detail. Doing so also sets the stage for building cost-efficiency into your project. By setting parameters early in the process, we can help you control costs long before groundbreaking.
Marry your wants with practicality
There are many decisions to be made in the planning stages of a building project and during construction. These decisions will determine how your new home will function, what it will cost and what it may be worth in the future. An experienced architect can help you make smart decisions about your home’s design that will serve you in surprising ways. It’s critical to have a realistic understanding of the potential and limitations of your project’s budget. An architect may propose ways of altering square footage or the type of materials to be used. A registered architect is especially knowledgeable in marrying your goals with practicality.
Design For Your Future
If you expect to live in this home for an extended time, an architect can: provide flexible design options to accommodate your changing family size or reduced mobility as you grow older; help choose certain amenities that can affect long-term value and resale; propose ways to lower energy cost and house maintenance over the long term; even suggest features such as window options that can protect carpets, flooring, and upholstery from damaging ultraviolet rays. At this planning stage you and your architect will analyze the big picture and design solutions with the long term, in mind.
Visualize the design
Once you define what is to be built, your architect can help you visualize the design possibilities in a number of ways. Using rough sketches or computer programs, the architect can show you the general arrangement of your new house and its effect on the site. While not finished construction documents, schematics are visual representations meant to show possible approaches for you to consider. These concepts are then refined until a solution is developed that meets your needs.
After your approval, the design is developed even further. Your architect will prepare detailed drawings through plans, elevations, sections and details to illustrate all the spaces to be built in their correct proportions. The materials and finishes to be used are analyzed and included in the documents.
Consultants are often called upon to enhance the scope of the project depending upon individual requirements. A structural engineer will be a part of this team. Other professionals such as electrical engineers and systems analysts, interior designers and landscape architects may be essential to a truly successful dream house creation.
Schedule of the work
After the design phases are complete, bidding, selection and construction phases ensue.
Your architect can assist you in selecting the contractor best suited for your project. He will help you analyze the many considerations to be taken into account during this phase of the work.. Price is important, yet time and timing, availability, reputation and relationships with subcontractors and material men are all significant.
Your architect has been through the construction process many times; during the construction process depend on your architect as much as possible. An architect can help anticipate problems so that your decisions are followed, construction is carried out efficiently, and the project is kept on track.