Shortly after we finished remodeling our current house, we started the design process for the new house. I think it all started one day when we were in the car, and I drew a ‘U’ shaped outline. We envisioned one of the arms of the U as a guest wing that we could close off when not in use so that we wouldn’t have to heat / cool / clean it. The main part of the house was to contain the kitchen and living area, and the other arm was the master suite and an office.
We kicked around the idea of having a garage either underneath in the basement or detached from the house and connected via a small walkway or breezeway.
That same basic outline lasted for quite some time, and got more and more detailed through the use of some ‘design for dummies’ software. We grew pretty emotionally attached to the layout, and spent a lot of time cutting out pages from magazines as inspiration for design elements in the different areas of the house.
At the end of the DIY design process, we had a notebook full of sketches and photographs, and some printouts from our software with as much detail depicted as we could show.
We realized at that point that before we went much further we would need to enlist some expert help. My friend Warren is a builder and suggested that we call B & G Drafting to get some help, and said that they had worked with him on some prior designs. Enter Jim and his ruthless red pen and cold efficiency. Within 15 minutes the design we were so attached to had undergone a pretty serious transformation. He shrank and grew walls, melded the garage into the structure, and moved things around quite a bit.
For the most part this was exactly what we were paying him for, and he likely saved us untold thousands of dollars and a great deal of frustration down the road. Knowing this, it was still difficult to get reacquainted with the new layout when we were so intimately familiar with the old one.
After one more session with him to review some preliminary drawings we ended up with a set of blueprints that were very close to what we had in mind. After reviewing them with our builder Doug, we determined that we could finally consider the design milestone more or less complete.