Month: October 2022

Dreams Take Shape

/ Emily / Leave a comment

Building a custom home is certainly a privilege and the experience of a lifetime. We spent long hours talking through what we wanted, researching ideas, reading books, exploring neighbourhoods for inspirations, measuring rooms, and sketching out plans. The process of designing a house truly forces you to think thoroughly about how you envision your life, now and in the future, how you use spaces, and what you can live with or without.

We eventually settled on a list of goals for our home, which we talked through with our architect in the beautiful home she designed. A week or so later, she let us know she had a preliminary design to show us. With bated breathed, we excitedly awaited the big reveal and… we didn’t like it! The first sketch we saw had the elements we’d discussed but didn’t feel right for us. But designing a house is a process – we talked it through, pointed out what we liked and did not, and sent some more sketches of our ideas. A week or two later she came back with two new options and this time we were quite pleased!

I downloaded RoomSketcher, a free floorplan design app, and recreated the plans. This allowed us to play around with ideas, move furniture around, and visualize the spaces in 3D. We polled friends and family on their thoughts and eventually settled on the plan we liked best. From there, we had quite a bit of back and forth on window and door configuration, trying our best to get right the details that are hard to change.

Image of cardboard house with LEGO furniture
Our little Bristol Board home with Lego furniture and lots of houseplants for that homey feel.

It’s hard not to get excited as you picture life in your future home. Not to be satisfied with digital renderings, we wanted something tactile we could walk through and play with. We bought a 60-metre measuring tape and pinned our floorplan on our land with sticks and string. We even got crafty and spent a couple cozy evenings constructing a scale (though somewhat floppy) model out of Bristol board and Lego.

One thing that’s always in mind when building a house (at least in my experience) is budget. We learned quickly that if you want to keep your design within budget, you need to loop in a builder early as they’re the ones with experience costing materials and labour. So, after a few weeks working on the design, we were happy with our plan and turned our attention to choosing a builder, another learning experience. As it turned out, we’d have a few more tweaks later in the process but that’s still to come.

This is the list we dreamed up of wants/goals for our home:

Multifunctional Spaces and Room for Hobbies

  • Every space has a purpose
  • Spaces align with how we actually use them (i.e., no formal dining room)
  • Spaces are multifunctional and accommodate togetherness or privacy
  • Small office/guest room/flex space 
  • Minimize single use spaces, such as hallways
  • Flexibility to reconfigure spaces if needed, e.g., add more bedrooms
  • Lots of storage for indoor and outdoor hobbies, large garage for outdoor equipment

Spaces for Privacy or Togetherness

  • Home gym/activity room/tv room to accommodate heavy equipment
  • Preferably single level, slab on grade
  • Places with sound isolation for noisy activities
  • Primary bedroom has privacy/retreat feel
  • Kitchen at the heart of the home
  • Large kitchen with lots of storage and room for two cooks
  • Open concept kitchen/living room for informal living and entertaining

Self-Sufficiency and Eco-Friendly

  • Set up for self-sufficiency e.g., wood stove for back up heat, solar/net zero ready/passive house
  • Passive solar orientation, minimal glazing on West and North sides
  • Lots of natural light
  • High ceilings in gym and kitchen/living room for airy feeling, lower ceilings in bedroom area for coziness
  • Bedrooms oriented to East for morning sun
  • Kitchen and living room oriented to south for sun
  • Modern aesthetic
  • Simple, easy to maintain finishes
  • Prioritize durable, efficient, low maintenance shell (e.g., passive house wall construction, passive windows and doors, metal exterior siding/roof)

Indoor/Outdoor Living

  • Orient house for privacy from the road
  • Dedicated laundry room and mudroom to leave outdoor dirt outdoors
  • Screened in porch and patio for outdoor meals/outdoor living spaces (and to keep out bugs)
  • Easy access to kitchen garden
  • Main view looking South over property
  • Maximize open spaces on property for sports and activities
  • Shelter house near forest, provide easy access to trails

Don’t Want

  • Formal dining room
  • Too many bedrooms/more house than we need
  • Bedrooms or bathrooms used only for guests
  • Cramped entryways
  • Limited storage
  • House prioritizing public faces
  • Propane/gas heating systems

What Next?

/ Emily / Leave a comment

There are a million paths you can take to building a house from the relatively straightforward to the long and twisty. As we looked to build, the options as we understood them were:

  1. Buy a new build in a development. This is the (relatively) easy route, where you pick from a set array of houses and make limited choices about finishes, customizations, and paid upgrades.
  2. Buy from a smaller builder. You see these advertised on real estate websites sometimes as ‘to be built.’ You buy a package from a builder and have perhaps slightly more choice over selections than in a big housing development.
  3. Fully custom. The most complicated option, where after the excitement of finding land settles, you’re hit with the realization of just what you’ve gotten yourself into, peering apprehensively down the long path ahead of you and asking yourself ‘what next?’ 

As it turns out, we’re gluttons for punishment and opted for the long and twisty route of a fully custom build.

Building a house is no easy feat, as we learned by watching some neighbours a few lines over.

Now there are options to make this somewhat easier, with several companies offering house packages. These packages include a floorplan, construction drawings, materials, and project management. We seriously considered going this route and in fact, spent a fair bit of time trying to make it work with one such company. Our sense was that this was a great choice if your needs are straightforward. It was also the custom build option with the most transparent pricing, as we’ve since found out.

Ultimately though, it didn’t work out with the package company. As we thought through what we wanted in our home, a list of goals took form. We spent hours measuring out rooms, thinking how we would use different spaces, and sketching floorplans. We found in the process that it was easy enough to sketch up a house with different elements we wanted but not so easy to bring it all together to make a home. We wanted advice on what did or didn’t work if we wanted to achieve different goals and we’re getting that. So, we parted ways with the package company and ate part of our deposit.

Back to the drawing board, we began exploring another path: hiring an architect. We were initially skeptical of this option, thinking it was beyond reach. We interviewed a few who sent back quotes that confirmed our suspicions (no way did we have $70K+ just for design), but then a builder we talked to suggested someone they’d worked with previously. 

We met with this architect who had experience designing passive houses, had designed her own passive house, and seemed to understand our goals. Her fee was also within our budget. We hired Jane Wilson and dove headlong into the design phase. This is where the fun begins!