Design

In my real job (non-blogging) I am finding that more and more people are interested in building a more environmentally responsible and healthy home.   Leaving political discussions and arguments about “climate change” behind (I don’t like being preached to and I don’t like preaching), I believe there are many common sense reasons to build a “Green” home .   Here are two pretty good ones: Save you money $$$ in the long run Reduce your stress level – improve your quality of life If you want to build a Green Home there is an abundant amount of information available to you.   But start investigating Green and you begin to realize there can be a daunting number of decisions to make – and they all impact your construction budget in some way.   Building Green can start to look incredibly complicated and expensive - and neither of these notions is inherently “Green”.   Well it does not  have to work that way. So what I want to do, starting with this posting is to help you simp...

Simply Elegant Home Designs is now providing a new and better way to visualize new house plan designs.  They are creating 3d animations of their designs.  The animations will be posted on the Simply Elegant Home Designs website and on You Tube.  The first animation to be published is this Modern Farmhouse plan design. Simply Elegant Home Designs will eventually be able to provide animations of their entire house plan inventory.

Hiring an Architect to design a one of a kind home for you can be a time consuming and expensive endeavor.  The design process will take at least several months - maybe up to a year.  And the fee can run from 8% to 12% of the construction cost or even higher.  That being said I believe it is well worth it - but not everyone has that luxury of time and money.  So what I want to do here is present you with an alternative approach that can work for many people. The basic concept is to purchase a set of plans "off the shelf" directly from an Architect, and then work with them to customize that plan to your specific needs and tastes.  The two images below depict a house designed by Larson Brenner Architects in Stillwater , Minnesota.   It is a beautiful Cape Cod design. The client loved the design inside and out.  But the plan would not fit on their own lot configuration, the room arrangement did not satisfy 100% of their needs and their aesthetic tastes tended more towards the ...