Designing Your Custom House Plan
Whether you are creating your first floor plan, or your fifth, designing the perfect house plan is difficult. Your residential architect can narrow down wants and needs, choose materials to fit your house style, and create a finished house plan that will fulfill your dreams, no matter how small or large. Consider these areas before talking to your architect:Land – Take a look at your lot from every angle to find the best views and the private areas you want to designate for areas of your home where you might not want others to be able to see into. See if you can use passive heating from your southern exposure to lower energy bills. Make sure you know about any buildings such as houses or even businesses that may be built near you in the future. Are there eco features you can implement on your lot to lower your energy costs such as geothermal heating, solar panels, or building part of your home in the earth? Can you design the home to minimize how much land you disturb during building?House Floor Plan – Most people already know the number of bedrooms and baths they want, but start thinking about how you use space so your floor plan can function well. For instance maybe you want your laundry to be near the bedrooms, some people however want the master bedroom away from kids rooms?Do you prefer an island or do you like appliances to be next to each other? Consider writing down what you have loved and hated about prior homes you’ve lived in. Think about the small things like placement of outlets that are often frustrating, or light switches. As you age, you may use space differently, so think ahead? Storage is often an issue in homes, think about where clutter collects and how you can design areas to deal with it.Materials – Choosing wood vs carpet, granite vs concrete, and vinyl siding vs stone, will of course have to do with personal choice and budget considerations. Thinking about new products that are sustainable and environmentally friendly from paint and caulk, to the large items like flooring, can have a big impact on the air quality in your home. Discuss building options like SIPs that can lower your energy bills.Details – The best part about designing a custom home is that you get to start from scratch, so include the small details that really make a house a home to you. Built in bookshelves, cubbies to show off your glass vase collection, a tile back-splash made from the antique tiles you picked up in Mexico, a double shower, these details mark the home as yours.Write down your ideas, adding photos from magazines that show what you want, and taking photos of your lot to pinpoint views can help your architect define your home design to capture your feelings more accurately.
