Our Home Build: Where to Start
Since announcing that we are in the process of building our home, I put a question box out on my Instagram to see what questions people had for us. The number one question I go was, where do you even start when building a custom home? It’s such a great & loaded question. I answered it in my stories & thought I saved it to a highlight, but I did in fact not actually save it! #fail So let’s dive in here, shall we?
I am treating our new build just like I would for any of my clients & I always start with inspiration. I created a Pinterest board for our home, as well as a shared save folder on Instagram for my husband & I to save anything we saw & liked while we were scrolling. I gave us 4 weeks to pin & save as much as we wanted. Then we sat down to discuss our must haves for our home.
one story
4 bedrooms
4.5 bathrooms
sitting room off the kitchen
study & gun room
maybe a gameroom
large mudroom
With these must haves in mind, I went ahead & took our Pinterest board & divided it into sections for each room in the house. We moved all of our pins into the the coordinating rooms on the board to help keep us organized. And then the fun part came, Matt & I slipped away to the lake for the weekend & we sat for 4 hours one afternoon diving into the boards & going room by room. We eliminated photos that we decided we didn’t love. We looked at the similiarities in many of the photos & picked one to be our inspiration. Our goal was to narrow down all of our inspiration for each room down to 5-10 images. Taking the time to go through & discuss every room made sure we were on the same page before we had our first meeting with our architect.
I also had a very specific idea in my head of our layout for the main rooms in the house, so I had a little fun one afternoon with some graph paper & sketched out my ideas, so we had that to take to our meeting with the architect too.
How to pick your architect?
This is a great question. I’ve worked with many over my 10 year career as an interior designer, and they each have things that I loved about them & their work. However for our home, since I really knew what we wanted I didn’t really need the architect to be super creative. I just needed someone to get my ideas on paper. So I asked around to other designers friends, who were also building their own homes & got some recommendations. I talked to a few, and found our guy. My best advice is check out their socials if they have them, ask friends & family if they recommend anyone & ask the hard questions.
What to take to your first meeting with the architect?
Another fantastic question that came to me via Instagram. We went with my sketch of the layout that we wanted, our Pinterest boards, HOA documents, site map, number of rooms & square footage we wanted to be at. Lance, our architect, took notes, asked questions, looked through our boards, and our sketch. After our two hour meeting he was ready to start on our home.
Do you find the architect or builder first?
There are a million ways to skin a cat, so I don’t think there is a right answer to this question. We decided to go with the architect first so that we can get our plans nailed down & so that I can start on the design work immediately. This is going to allow us to have the full design of the home done when our plans are to bid set. I’ve had clients who have come to me with their builder picked out but no architect or plans, and we walked alongside them in that process.
We plan on interviewing a few builders to discuss their process and just get a feel for them. I’ve worked with a lot of different builders and have seen process that work and don’t, things that I like & don’t like about how they do business or the work their trades produce. I also know how important it is to really enjoy your builder & their team as people because you are getting into a long-term relationship with them. With all of these factors in mind, I’ll be chatting with some builders that I have worked for in the past with clients, because I’ve never been a client. I’ll talk with my clients that have worked with them & ask them their opinions on how things went. We’ve also asked friends, who are building, about their builders & have decided to interview a couple of them as well.
Next week, I’ll be sharing how things are going with our architect & what this phase in the process looks like. If you have any questions, you can always leave a comment here or reach out to me on Instagram.