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Home › Articles › Architecture and Design › Mission Possible

Mission Possible

Designing and Building Your Own Dream Home

By Suzy Feine

Pages:  1  2  3  

Dream home. Two simple words that, when put together, conjure up visions of grandeur. Cathedral ceilings, marble flooring, granite countertops, built-in everything. The type of house you wish you could afford. But can you?

The home of my dreams is unlike anything on the market. You won't see my home reproduced two houses down. In fact, you won't see a home like mine anywhere. For me, a dream home has nothing to do with expensive flooring or built-ins. It is the home of my family's dreams the one we discussed, planned and sketched on paper. The home design we provided to the builder and not vice versa.

Designing then building your dream home can be exciting, aggravating, challenging and intriguing, all at the same time. Unless you know what to expect each week, it can also be tremendously frustrating, thus rendering your dream home a nightmare.

To ease that frustration, we've compiled this week-by-week account, from design through build, of the steps we took to complete our dream home. This chronicle could be a valuable reference point if you anticipate joining the trend toward custom home construction.

The Design
The home design floor plan plus architectural style is a critical element in custom construction. Decisions made now will impact the entire process, many of which cannot be changed later. To begin, we visited dozens of model homes, combed through home design magazines and selected a "mission" architectural style, based on the designs by Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect. Our realtor worked with us, listened to our preferences and transferred these preferences to a floor plan using home design software. This software allowed us to plot room dimensions, shift walls and fine-tune our floor plan again and again. Once finalized, this floor plan was then used as a tool to select a custom builder.

A custom builder should have vast experience with your chosen architectural style. He should be open to your custom ideas and work closely with an experienced architect to generate blueprints from your floor plan. These blueprints are first used by the survey crew to transfer the dimensions of your home to your lot. Later, blueprints are used by many subcontractors throughout the building process.

The Build
A typical building process is non-existent. Each build cycle varies drastically and is subject to a number of factors including schedules, availability of supplies and weather. Our 13-week build cycle proceeded as follows: