Building Our Custom Home – Part IV – Finalizing the Plans

As I mentioned earlier I gave the architect a detailed list of my requirements for the home. A good architect can point you towards resources or provide a list of questions of consider. You don’t want to use a lot the architect’s time waiting for him to dig out every detail from you. It is best you come prepared with your ideas to the first meeting.
You will need a list (bullet list is fine) of the number of rooms in the house, use or purpose of each room, scale or size of each room, overall floor size, double level, basement, ranch style. You will also want to consider current family needs – children, their age – and changing needs of the family in the future. It is also preferable if you can bring pictures of what you like so the architect can get an idea of what your preferences are visually rather than trying to describe them in words.
Finally, my advice, if you plan to hire an architect, let him/her design the house. My instructions to our architect were, give me all these space requirements and you come up with the look of the home. I did not have any comments regarding picture windows, dormers etc. The design was entirely up to him. That’s why I hired him.
In our next meeting, the architect showed me come conceptual drawings. This looks like nothing more than a kid’s drawing. Some circles and squares placed next to each other. With a very general idea of what shape the house might take. Example, a circular corner here, or use this end for a grand statement to the street – these kinds of general ideas. This is an important stage, this is early in the design process and if you are unsure if you like it, raise your concerns now, further down the road, you may have to restart the design – you lose time and it costs more money to get a new set of plans. So review your own notes and look at the conceptual plans and see if you see a lot of what you want in a home.
Once this is approved the architect will continue on to make the first set of plans. Once the rooms and layouts are actually put down to scale, a lot of things change. You find you cannot tuck that room in here, or this must be larger than expected to accommodate that, etc. This is still an early stage.
One of my requests was to combine the dining and living areas as one space and do away with a family room. This gave us a large space; the architect decided it would be stunning to place this square room on a diagonal to the rest of the rectangular house. This would create some funky rooflines and make for an interesting street view. I liked the idea and we went ahead with it.
A couple more versions of the plans emerged as they were fine tuned. The architect sent me 3-D images of the exterior of the house. In his office, I was able to walk-through the virtual house. Since I studied architecture myself, I couldn’t resist offering critiques of his design.
When our plans were finalized, the architect presented them to our neighborhood design committee. This committee consisted of the developer and I guess his buddy a major builder in our community. They were both aghast at the plans. They thought the plans were too outrageous and would not fit the style of the neighborhood. They also didn’t like the color of the house, white bricks and blue siding. Apparently the white bricks are too institutional and the developer doesn’t like the color blue!! Of course, I heard this from my architect at 5:00 pm on a Friday.
So I stewed all weekend and thought about the plans. I have to say the rejection may actually have been good in the long run. You see, since I had copies of the plans on my computer I used them to plan furniture layouts. I already had dimensions of our furniture we planned to keep. And no matter how I tried, it was difficult to arrange the furniture in a reasonable manner in the diagonally shaped room. By the final plan, the room was too large, so we had knocked out some corners, so it wasn’t exactly a diamond shape anymore. But one of the features I loved about the room was it would have a single slope roof from front to back, and just under the roofline to the front of the house, we would have 3 clerestory windows.
Over the weekend, I left a message for our architect not draw any new plans until he met with me. I asked him to simply make the room square again. I could see he was disappointed, he may have felt I let him down and didn’t stand behind his design. But I told him the roof line stays, the clerestory windows stay and what’s more the guest bedroom on the main floor would have to be tucked into the house to keep an even front façade, this created a loft inside our main living/dining area. Hearing this he was on board with the plans once again. I had to pay extra for these changes to the plans. But I also know he gave me a huge break on the price.
Our architect likes windows and we have a lot of big windows all over the house. So many that in our living room we would not have any wall space to hang a picture or place a cabinet. I asked the architect to remove the window, but he wouldn’t do it. So one day, I was in his office going over the plans with the drafter and asked her to simply delete one window.
With the new changes I felt I had put something of my own design into the house as well, although I will still stay the house was designed by my architect. The down side to the changes was that we lost the amazingly spacious front porch. But there were still more design details to work on…
Copyright Kalpana Kanwar August 2009