Creating the home of your dreams or updating your current one doesn’t have to be a nightmare.
As overwhelming as it sounds, customizing your home can be made easier if you prioritize your projects, create a reasonable budget and stick with your vision. Here are some simple steps to get you on your path to designing your dream home.
How to Design Your Custom Home
- Sketch your ideas. Brain
Make lists of features you want each room to have – just get your ideas out of your head and onto paper. Even rough sketches can help your home design team understand what you want.
Your brief will more than likely go through countless revisions and drafts. Expect it to change and mold as you pinpoint the size and scale of the project along with the projected timeline, budget and aesthetic requirements.
- Tour neighborhoods with houses that spark your imagination.
Keep an eye out for homes that are up for sale. An open house could present a great opportunity to take a closer look at a particular home inside and out. Write down notes of essentials you can picture in your new home and what you want replaced. Even if you don’t particularly like the outside of the house, there may be some features inside that catch your attention.
- Draw up a responsible budget.
Once you start working with the architects, they can give you “cost estimates” on what the home would cost to build or upgrade. Keep in mind that they have no control over time and labor costs from contractors, but they’re pretty solid about prices on their material selections. Along with a professional architect, you will need an engineer, a planning consultant and possibly light and landscape designers. You may also wish to speak with a financial professional to ensure you appropriately manage the funds required to complete the project. If you already know where your custom home will be situated, be sure to consider the topography, size and best features of the lot.
- Evaluate how your family uses a home.
Take notice on your family’s traffic pattern. That will help determine where rooms like bedrooms should be positioned. It can determine if a mudroom is necessary or an office space. Likewise, if you’re the kind of family that tends to gather around the kitchen, an open floor plan with easy flow between the living room, kitchen and dining area will suit you well.
- Consider light and sound.
Determine where the sun rises and sets in relation to your home design. That will help determine where to put things like a sunroom or a large bank of windows. It can also help determine whether to put bedrooms in the front of the house or toward the rear where it may be further from neighbors or road noises.
Remember that it’s far easier to be upfront about what you do and do not like than it will be to remodel your custom home later. Staying in regular communication with your architect and your builder will help you ensure that what is being built is in line with your original brief.
How to Redesign Your Current Home
- Determine why you want to make a change.
Knowing why you are redesigning your home will help drive the actual plans and help you keep focused on that original goal. Follow a before-and-after plan and create a vision for what you hope to achieve with the changes to come. To simplify and streamline the process even further, the use of an architectural rendering of your house with all of the proposed changes. An architectural rendering is a wonderful way to help you visualize and know for sure you are getting the look you want and see what the final result will be.
- Contact your lender or mortgage advisor at an early stage.
This will allow you to determine your qualifications for mortgage financing. Avoid refinancing complications and have legal counsel available.
- Focus on reducing your energy costs.
A good thing to do whether you’re redesigning your home or starting to build is focusing on reducing your energy costs. Upgrading your insulation and buying energy efficient windows and doors could save you much more money than you originally invested. Especially older houses tend to have less efficient insulation and other sources of energy loss like ill-fitting windows and it could be costing you more than you think.
- Consider room additions.
Finishing spaces like basements or rooms over the garage adds to your square footage and creates more livable space within an existing footprint.
- Change the flow.
If you feel like your living room seems small and cramped, consider combining it with your kitchen. Taking down walls can create more space and make your home seem bigger instantly.
- Repaint to refresh.
Even the slightest change in wall color can make a room look larger and brighter. Lighter colors create the illusion of a bigger room. Changes on the outside can give your home a new look too. Consider upgrading your home’s exterior to new siding for better energy efficiency and curb appeal. Small improvements throughout your house can increase its value overall and lead you toward your ideal home.
Stick to a Vision for Your Home Project
Redesigning your home or building a custom home can be daunting but sticking to a vision and a budget can help reduce the stress of the process. Smaller renovation projects like new doors and windows as well as re-siding your home with a product that will last a lifetime can give homeowners a big bang for their buck. Thompson Creek professionals have been helping homeowners redesign and upgrade their home’s windows, doors, siding and gutter system for about 40 years. Call our professionals today to see how they can jump start your home renovation project.