Planning & Prep

Posted June 3rd, 2008 by Jen in features, the ranch
6 Comments »

by My Husband

Strangely enough, when undertaking a building project you’ll receive a flood of marital counseling. For me, it came from a few friends, first the realtor and then the mortgage guy. They all say, with a certain seriousness, to be careful not to let the building experience ruin or even destroy your marriage. They profess to have actually seen it happen. It seems so odd when starting out, but the story goes that as the project progresses, the endless flood of decisions can lead to conflicts between you and your spouse. Fighting over such things as wall colors or door sizes, cabinet styles or floor coverings may seem trivial, however if we really look at the pettiness of most of our day to day arguments, they are usually of even less importance.

So, the first bit of advice is to pray. Pray for yourself and your significant other to have grace, patience and latitude towards one another when making these choices. Try to start by agreeing on broad rules and making your concessions here. Agree on an overall color and decor theme and in general an overall feel. Look at magazines; we went through a lot and clipped out everything we liked. We went on the Tour of Homes and just talked - “Oh I like that” or “Man, that bath tile looks too fancy for my taste.” We also liked to go through new developments and tour the model home. It’s a great way to find all kinds of ideas and to see what the current hot design ideas are. You’ll soon find common ground and have learned what you both like.

Once you have a good feel for what you’re shooting for, you need to make sure it fits with where you’re building. Our lot is very, how should we say, cowboy. It’s high desert, there is sage brush, craggly old junipers and coyotes and rattlesnakes to boot. I love rustic and wanted a house that complemented the sage greens and desert tans all around us. As simple as this seems, it really helped to define our style before we started looking at things like siding, paints and stains.

SITE PLANNING
Depending on your lot size and local building codes you’ll need to determine where your house will sit, where the driveway will go, how you’ll hook into utilities and a myriad of other topics. We were required to submit a site plan to the county that showed all of these things drawn to scale, along with easements and setbacks, as well as where our well would be drilled and where the septic system would be located.

These types of decisions can be hard to make, especially if you have a larger lot where you have more possibilities. I spent a lot of time driving to the property and walking it over and over. I brought ladders and climbed trees to try and get a feel for what second story views would look like at different locations. I was also very mindful of how much privacy the trees in different locations offered. I really didn’t like the idea of having to put blinds on our windows to obtain privacy when we lived on 20 heavily treed acres.

When considering locations, I also thought about how much it would cost to get utilities and a road to any particular building site. I had a 100′ tape measure and had already called the power company to see what they charged to put in power. If you’re too far way then they have to bring in more equipment, lines and transformers, which translated means more money. I also borrowed a friend’s laser level and checked elevation to see where I could put my septic system’s drain field without requiring a pump.

After collecting all of this information and weighing the options, we made the decision to build about 500 feet further up on the property than we had initially planned. What seemed like an obvious building location at first glance became less attractive as we really looked. The location where the house now sits is, without a doubt, the right spot. It has great views that weren’t initially apparent but came into their own with some selective thinning of trees. It also has a great amount of privacy. Finally, the location was the most economical spot for connecting to utilities, installing a septic system and building a driveway.

HOUSE PLANNING

We really were hoping to find a stock plan that we liked, but it was a useless venture. The fact that I work at home and thus need a separated space for an office, combined with the need for a full master suite for Jen’s mom, limited our options. Nothing seemed right for our needs. Having done design, 3D and a little CAD over the years, I thought I would take a crack at trying to design our home. After a few frustrating weekends, a bit of wisdom broke through as I figured out that I had no idea about how a house should flow and what standard dimensions were.

Instead I found a small design company with a nice portfolio who could listen to our wants and come up with a plan for us. House designers are less expensive than architects but can still do great work. If you want to save money with a stock plan, find house designers in your area and view their stock plans. These plans will already be engineered to your local building codes and you’ll find styles that match your locale.

We had an initial meeting with the designers, showed them some styles we liked and gave them some rough parameters – the rooms we needed, our overall square footage and budgeting goals. I made it clear that while I wanted an aesthetically pleasing house, I didn’t want a lot of complicated angles and open beams and so forth that would really add to the cost. It took a few meetings and revisions to get things tweaked just right, but it was, in all, a fairly painless experience.

One final item to note is energy savings. I am not a “green” advocate but I hate paying my electric bill. As a result, I investigated several energy saving building strategies. Solar passive design is fairly easy to incorporate into a home design and is an easy way to seriously cut your heating and cooling costs. I simply made sure the house’s southern exposure was maximized and that there were enough windows on that side to collect solar heat in the winter months and enough window overhang to shade against solar heat in the summer months. I’ll touch more on this in a future article, but for now just bear in mind that for decades homes were designed without any consideration of that huge ball of energy that our planet revolves around. Take advantage of free heating energy from the sun in the winter and block it in the summer and you’ll keep a lot of greenbacks in the bank.

CONCLUSIONS

For anyone who might be starting down the path of building your own home at anytime in the future, I would offer the following advice.

First, realize this is just a house, wood, paint and tile. It is not eternal and thus should be viewed as temporary. I heard a great sermon on the radio one day as were just breaking ground. The pastor talked about how we often talk about things in a possessive nature, like we somehow earned it or own it. He used the example of a piece of land (how fitting) and how he found himself referring to it as “his” property, and that the Lord corrected him and reminded him that it was someone else’s before him and will be someone else’s after him, and that in truth all things are from God and are God’s. This is instrumental. Treat your building project as a blessing for this season and you’ll find it easier to let go of the incidentals.

Second, spend time considering how to get the most out of your lot. The footprint and positioning of your house will affect many things, especially on smaller lots. Moving your home toward the street on a small lot will give you more of a back yard, but haphazardly plopping it right in the middle for no good reason may eat up valuable usable space. Think of windows and sunlight. Do you like sun on your toes in the morning on those cold winter months? If so, consider where the southern exposure is and how to situate your home to maximize this.

Third, choose a designer to work with, even if you go with a stock plan out of a magazine. You’ll most likely have to have it re-engineered to local code and that means things like walls and roofs might need to change and this is where a designer can make it look right and save you a ton of headaches down the road. You may be able to find an architect that fits your budget, otherwise the designer will make the changes and have an engineer calculate the loads and put his stamp on the plans.

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