Design A House

Once you have land, one of the next things you ought to consider is how to design a house. There are a bunch of different options to consider. Basically, they boil down to meeting with a home builder, sitting down with an architect, or researching and buying some house designing software.

We have already met with some builders. Builders will present a wide array of options, especially if you meet with multiple builders that specialize in different styles, areas, and price ranges. Some builders will suggest that you use one of their existing designs and tweak things to suit your needs. One of the builders that we talked to had us walk through a couple of his houses. After that, the idea was that we'd just tell him what we liked and he'd kinda wing it and come up with something for us.

Another builder (which was a bit higher priced) had their own house designer on staff. They showed us plans from some of their current projects to give us an idea of how the process would work. This would be something in between the "walk-through plus wing-it" strategy and hiring an architect to draw up house plans. This is actually somewhat nice, because we'd probably end up with what we want, and it wouldn't be quite as expensive as hiring a third-party (assuming we wanted this builder to do some of the building also).

The way I understand it, hiring an architect to design a house would work something like this. First, you'd sit down with them to lay out your initial ideas, desires, constraints, topography, etc. They'd then draw up an initial plan. You'd come back for another consultation, they'd discuss it with you, and then you'd decide on changes. This feed-back loop would repeat until you were happy with the house design. Finally, you'd walk away with a set of blueprints, and the process would hopefully be complete. If it needed tweaking, you'd have to go back and pay for it.

Being a computer guy, the "3D Home Design" software do-it-yourself option really appeals to me. Basically, we get some house designing software, teach ourselves how to use it, and then go nuts designing homes by ourselves until we have reached perfection. It's cheap, we're in control, and it sounds fun. I mean people play games like Sim Theme Park or Rollercoaster Tycoon just for fun. Why shouldn't we play How To Build House and end up with something that is actually usable in real life when we're done? That sounds like the ultimate high score to me.

So, for now, let's focus on the software option. This option may become a hybrid with one of the other options in the future, but for now, it will be us playing the how to build house videogame. In my next post, I plan to discuss some of the software options available to design a house.