In home building, there are those dreadful clients that are always changing something, from design to on-site visits, there never satisfied. We have one of those clients, unfortunately, it’s us.
Once again we have changed our mind, this time not just the floor plan, but the whole exterior. The more I looked at our plan, the more flaws I found. Below are the two main reasons we are changing our design.
- Average Design: The more I looked at it the more I realized how average the design was. While I was looking at another builder’s website, who was offering SIP panel construction, I came across a house that looked familiar, big gable porch, smaller gable beside it with another smaller gable projecting from the front of it. Boring, normal, average and standard Midwestern sub-division house came to mind. I instantly became depressed and excited at the same time. All the work we had done over the past 3 weeks was out the window. We literally were one day from sending bid request out. I had just met with Wayne, our salesman at Pro Build and he had already started doing a take-off for materials. It was not good timing. On the other hand, I knew that we were going to end up with an awesome house, and we will! Kyle is working this weekend to have plans ready for Monday. We will update the blog and website, hopefully by Tuesday, with the new floor plans.
A side note, I mean no offence to those who live in the house I described above, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. We have always been unique with ours houses and plan to keep stepping outside the box, building a showcase house that’s normal just doesn’t fit.
- Wasted space: As I described in the last “Changing of the Design” blog, putting all the living space on the main floor, left a huge amount of wasted space in the attic. If we put the bedrooms upstairs, the stair placement became a problem. Also, in the main area I wanted a WOW factor since we only had 9’ exterior walls. To do this we would need to vault the area or raise the ceiling height. If we did this, it would make the upstairs unusable.
The house we are designing now fixes both problems. It will have 9’ walls, but will have an open truss, shed type roof on it. This will eliminate most of the wasted attic space while still giving us a wow factor inside.
The outside will have a simple, sleek, modern look. This takes care of the unique design part.
Though changing your mind half way through the building process is never encouraged, having your dream home is. Making extreme changes like this does come at a price and you should expect to pay for it with time and money. Having an honest designer and builder is important to ensure you don’t get over charged every time you make a change.
Plan as much as you can, have fun with your design, never settle for status quo, and keep an open mind. The rest always falls into place.
