Design and build your family’s ‘forever’ home without making costly mistakes
This post provides the big-picture roadmap, with deeper, more detailed guides coming in the future. Bookmark this page. Ultimately, it’s the starting point for everything your journey towards living in your new custom home.
Most homeowners only build their ‘forever’ home once. Over the last fifty years, I’ve been involved in hundreds of projects.
I’m a professional residential designer with a degree in architecture, a former ‘Class A’ licensed homebuilder, and a real estate developer. As a result, I’ve seen what works, what fails, and what quietly drains budgets long after move-in day.
This site exists to protect everyday families from expensive, irreversible mistakes, not to sell you on trends, upsells, or glossy inspiration that ignores real-world consequences.
This blog is organized into a doable, step-by-step process of small, bite-sized tasks that you can simply accomplish by focusing on one at a time. Ultimately, the final step will be finishing your dream home and moving in.
Each primary category is followed by a more detailed series of posts to guide you through the process.
The best home design complements an existing property. Get the lot first and design the house to fit it, rather than having a plan you like and then shopping around for a lot that fits. (That’s more of a ‘spec’ plan.)
Everyone’s criteria for what makes the ‘perfect’ lot will differ. Meet with your family and write your list of requirements. Divide the items into ‘needs’ and ‘wants’.
When you’re checking off the boxes on a specific piece of property, all of the ‘needs’ boxes need to be checked. You want as many of the ‘want’ boxes checked as possible, though it’s rare to check off everything.
‘Needs’ will include: water, sewer, electricity, internet, price within budget, road access, clear title, sufficient area to accommodate your plan, the right school district, etc.
‘Wants’ might include items such as views, neighborhood amenities, and old-growth trees.
We will provide free checklists of everything that you need to remember before buying a piece of property in a future post.
Designing your house involves satisfying a wide variety of sometimes contradictory requirements.
The floor plan needs to meet your family’s needs and reflect your lifestyle. It has to satisfy your ‘wish list’.
You want it to look great from the outside and have a ‘style’ that reflects your good taste.
The plan needs to ‘flow’ from one room (or area) to the next, and the rooms need to be linked in some logical order.
There has to be enough wall space in the dining room for the china cabinet you inherited from your Grandma to fit comfortably.
Your house needs to be within budget. You don’t want the monthly mortgage to be a struggle.
It would be great if it were ecological and made from sustainable materials. It would also be great if it used passive energy, so your electric bill wasn’t too high each month.
You want the house to complement your property.
It should also be a fun place to live and raise your family.
There’s a long list of boxes to check off, and we will describe how to do so.
Two distinct drawing steps are involved in the process:
First, there is a less formal process where you put your ideas down on paper. This is something that happens as you work your way through the design and generally occurs on a series of tracing paper overlays, which we called ‘bumwad’ back in architecture school.
I personally start with some really basic schematic drawings…bubble diagrams. These are intended to show, in general, where the rooms are located and how they fit together.
This blog plans to teach you that method through a series of videos entitled ‘Bumwad University’.
The second phase of drawing is more formal and intended to describe your design to the people who issue the building permit, finance the construction, and actually build the thing.
These are what are referred to as ‘Construction Documents’ or blueprints.
There are many different ways to complete these drawings: you can hire an architect, designer, or draftsperson. You can draw the plans the old-school way with a pencil, or you can use basic CAD software.
We are going to get into another series of videos that walk you through the CAD software route with the relatively simple SketchUp program.
We also plan to go through the process of teaching you how to be your own General Contractor.
The goal is to save money and gain control by building your custom home yourself.
A General Contractor coordinates all the different subcontractors and suppliers. Our intent is to walk you through the scheduling and sequencing logistics necessary to take the project from ‘dream’ stage up to final move-in.
If you don’t have the down payment money right now, or want a little practice at this before you start your dream home, doing it as a ‘side-hustle’, using other people’s money, is a useful process to learn.
In this section, we will discuss:
Slow the process down long enough to avoid panic decisions
