Now is a great time to build! Builders are hungry, prices of many construction materials are low, and the vendors are making deals to get business. If you have the resources, don’t wait. Build now and capture the savings. Right now, Warren Buffett is buying U.S. stocks because he sees them as a low-priced opportunity. Construction costs represent the very same opportunity. You can cash in big time if you act now. 

    I got a note from a prospective client recently asking for my advice on what construction costs might be for a new house. They were in the early stages of planning and wanted to get an idea of how much their new house might cost. Here is my answer:

    I have recently had a house price out at $170 per foot and another as high as $275 per s.f. There are a lot of variable that can affect the cost, as you can imagine. The formula I use is to include all of the “heated” square feet. I do not count the garage and/or porches. This formula is sort of the industry standard. For budgeting purposes, I would suggest using $200 per s.f. as the low end and $250 as the higher end. Of course, it is possible to go considerably higher. The variability of cost is due to different exterior materials, the shape of the house, the appointments within the house, and the site considerations. But above $250 per s.f., the added cost is attributed to particular items, like very expensive cabinetry or particular site conditions, and things like that. It’s hard to get more definitive than that until the house is designed and those numerous variables are known.

    My suggestion for calculating your square footage is to list out the rooms and spaces you want, including staircases, closets and hallways, if you can. Then assign target sizes to those spaces. It can help to use your current house and its rooms as guidelines for the target room sizes. Then multiply out the areas of each room, total it up, and then add ten or fifteen percent to the total. That added percentage is to account for the area used up by the walls themselves. Three running feet of a typical interior wall takes up one square foot! And the percentage accounts for inefficiencies in the actual house layout. Not every room will end up exactly at the target size. Then multiply the total by $200 and also by $250. That should give you a high and low number and a feel for where your construction cost will be.

    Incidentally, when stating these costs of construction, I am including all of the sitework, like landscaping, driveway, irrigation, etc. These costs estimates also anticipate a three car garage, a front porch, a screened porch, and things like that. The figures also include all permits and inspection fees. They include everything that would be in you contract with the builder.

    I will say that right now is a terrific time to build because the marketplace is hungry and prices are good. Lumber is very low, vendors are anxious to make deals, and even the builders are trimming their markup to get projects signed up. I think that in a couple of years we will look back at today and say, “Wasn’t that a great time to build? Everything was such a bargain.” Once the economy improves, the prices will surely go up quickly. Now that oil prices are going back down, some of the materials that went up due to the very high oil prices, like shingles, will likely go down sometime soon because of the slowdown in demand for construction products.

    Take advantage of this Golden Opportunity to get your dream house built at a price you will never see again. The woes of Wall Street can be a bonanza for you.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    Garage doors are often one of the ugliest features on the exterior of a house. There are now quite a few “carriage house” type doors to choose from that look much better than the traditional flat or raised panel doors. But those special doors come at a significant cost increase. There are other solutions you might want to consider.

    Garage doors are often an unsightly feature simply because of their scale. We human beings tend to prefer objects that are an appropriate size or scale to our own size. The doors and windows of your house will be most appealing when they are size-appropriate to the people who will occupy the house. They will “express” an interaction with other people. On a subconscious level, we can emotionally connect with architectural features like that. Garage doors must, by their very nature, be sized and scaled to the automobiles that must pass through them. Garage doors end up being the largest doors on your house. We find them unattractive for that very reason.

    Being true to his sardonic nature, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant vines.” It’s a clever line, but vines can serve a greater purpose for architects than simply camouflaging errors. They can be useful elements that can be integrated into the architecture. Here is an example of vines used to soften the visual impact of three, blank garage doors in an otherwise featureless portion of a house.

Pergola with Vines above Garage Doors

    It’s almost impossible to discuss composition and architectural proportion without referring to the golden mean, also called the golden section. Readers of Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code may recall the description of that formula in the book. As a brief refresher, the golden mean is the original organizing and proportioning method or formula for art and architecture. Its theory tells us that human beings are most pleased when things are in a proportion of 1 to 1.618. In other words, if a window is one unit wide, it should be 1.618 units tall in order to be the most appealing to human eyes. The golden mean was used prominently in Greek and Roman architecture and is just as useful in today’s world. Indeed, the same ratio that was applied to the design of the Parthenon is likely to aid your architect in the design of your new home.

    The golden mean offers a comfortable proportion with which to work, but it’s not the only comfortable proportion, so you don’t have to feel locked into it. The intriguing thing about the golden mean, about placing things at this scale, is that it just about always works. Consider it a safety net for proportions.

     A bit of architectural trivia: A classic and pervasive curved shape used to this day in crown moldings, wood trims, and other architectural details is the “ogee” curve. The “ogee” is a direct derivative of the golden mean. This curve originates with the Greeks and shows up in the columns we place on our front porches, crown moldings we place in our living rooms, and even the curves that are shaped into the aluminum gutters outside our houses. Who knew that ancient Greek classical design would eventually create aluminum gutters?

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    In homebuilding, picking out the right materials can be a little tricky.

    I talked yesterday about the value of painting out larger samples of your wall and trim paint selections to verify that the colors were right. The same principles applies to the other materials you plan to use. Don’t pick bricks from a photo or even from a brick sample card with several thin bricks on it. Without mortar, the bricks will look different than they will on your house. Stone is even tougher. I can’t imagine being confident in a stone selection from a handful of loose stones. Stones come in a very wide range of colors, textures, and sizes. And there is no good way to describe stone in words. Photos of other walls help, but you need to be sure your builder can reproduce the wall you want.

    Insist that your builder construct a sample wall where you can see the “real” finished product.

Homebuilding Stone Samples

    In this photo, the stone mason has laid up three sample panels with several mortar joint options. You cans see two of them in this closer view.

Mortar Joints in a Stone Wall

    The top joint is called a “raked” joint. The mortar has been scraped back to let the edges of the stones show more. The lower joint is a brushed joint where the mortar is flush with the face of the stone and brushed somewhat smooth with a bristle brush. You can see that the effects are remarkably different.

    Simply picking the brick or stone for your house is not enough information for you to give your builder. It leaves too much to the imagination. You need to decide upon the color of the mortar, the way the mortar is “struck” or “tooled,” and you need to be sure you, your architect, the builder, and the mason all have the same image in mind for the final wall. The only sure-fire way to do this is to lay up a sample wall and create a physical sample. If the first samples don’t capture the look you want, pull it down and try again. The small cost of doing this will save you thousands in unnecessary cost, not to mention the aggravation and angst of getting the wall wrong.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    In a high-end community where I have designed nearly one hundred houses, there are fairly strict house design guidelines. Covenants and restrictions are a necessary element in maintaining a level of quality, and thus, maintaining property values. No one is happy if a lime green house ends up next door. Design restrictions offer some limits, and as Martha Stewart says, that is a good thing.

    But some restrictions can go too far. One rule this community has is that every house must have a clearly displayed house number. That, in and of itself, is fine. Emergency vehicles need to be able to find the correct house, so I have no objection to that. But our Architectural Review Board has gone further and determined that only one style of house number is permitted. It is a bronze, somewhat traditional plaque with only one available font for the numerals.

    My objection has always been that the style of the house numbers should be compatible with the style of the house. A contemporary house would look odd with colonial numbers and vice versa. Today, the Chicago Tribune has an article on exactly this issue. It’s entitled Your house, by the numbers and was written by Mary G. Pepitone.

    I could not have expressed it better myself.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    In today’s quiz on house design bloopers, I offer up this photo.

     My question to you, dear reader, is do you see what’s wrong with this brickwork?

     I’ll tell you what struck my eye in tomorrow’s post.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

I happened to run across HGTV’s Dream House 2009. Here it is.

The outside looks nice, but the plans are pretty bad.

Here’s the Comment I left on the Blog site.

“I am surprised that your “Dream Home” contains so many basic design errors and displays such a lack of solid design principles. Let me list a few that instantly come to mind.

1.  A 3628 s.f. house is a big house, yet there is little good working surface in the kitchen. It looks like there is only the space on the island, and that is broken up with the sink, and then there is a couple of feet to either side of the cooktop. That’s it.

2. If the “island looking” thing between the Kitchen and the Family Room is just that, an island, then I would presume the dishwasher is next to the sink. So where would the upper glassware cabinet be? The isn’t one but you need one.

3. But if the island I just mentioned is a full-height wall and there are nice cabinets on it, then the kitchen is cut off from the Family Room, making the house end up broken up into individual rooms. This does not work well for today’s open living style.

4.  The Family Room is a disaster to furnish. The fireplace would be much better on the side backing up to the staircase. In its current location, it blocks any view out the back, limits window area, thus diminishing natural ligth, and it juts out into the Rear Covered Porch making half of it virtually unusable.

5. You call this a great house for entertaining, yet it has a dead-end Living Room. To enhance flow, the major rooms of a house should have two ways in and out.

6.  The Living Room is a relic of the past and will become an under-used, “museum” living room that no one uses. It is a waste of space.

7. And speaking of wasted space, the Dining Room is hardly the shape typical dining room furniture would fit into easily. There will be leftover areas that have no good use.

8. I would think that a house of this size would have a Butler’s Pantry to provide extra storage for dishes and serve as a bar when entertaining.

9. The Powder Room is an abomination. It is so cramped as to be virtually unusable.

The second floor is not much better.

1.  I hope there is good sound insulation in the floor. Because when the washing machine and dryer are running, it will broadcast the sound through the floor into the main living space below!

2. The Laundry Room looks way too tight. I wonder how they’ll get the machines in and out, let alone work in there.

3. There is a door-over-door conflict in Bedroom #3 and its closet door.

4. There is no cross-ventilation in the sleeping area in the Master Bedroom.

5. The Master Closet door swings the wrong way so you would have to walk all the way around the door to get into it.

6. The big window above the Master Bath tub faces the front and presumably the street. So it will have a covering over it all times.

The outside looks nice, but the house lacks any sense of spatial efficiency. It also does not address universal design and aging in place. For a pretty good sized house, I find this one to be disappointing. Visit my website to learn about how to design a better house. www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    Do you have a clear vision of the perfect house for you and your family?

    If you are like most people, your vision of your dream house is actually an idea without much in the way of concrete details. It may consist of mental images of houses you admire or remember. You may have merely a sense of what it should be, but no clear image of it in a physical way. This is normal. No architect expects you to come to his or her office with a design. After all, that’s what the architect’s job is. You’ve got to give you architect a chance to earn his or her money!

    So how do you get your vision of your dream house to coalesce? How do you communicate those thoughts to your architect or designer? Do you write out your thoughts? Do you describe your vision in terms of style, like “Craftsman, or Traditional?

    Here’s a paragraph from my book where I discuss one way of “getting your arms around” your Dream House vision and how to might communicate it to others.

     “Be aware that labels and style names can be confusing. If you tell me that you want a house reminiscent of the Italian hill country, you may have a mental image of a refined, hillside villa that is dramatically different from the image of a rustic, agrarian building that may come to my mind. Remember what we discussed earlier. Communication failures are the cause of many problems in design and construction. Communicate as clearly as you can. To that end, I urge my clients to start clipping out pictures from magazines. An excellent interior designer I work with refers to these clippings as “inspiration images,” a wonderful phrase. Inspiration images do not dictate exactly what the house will be, and we are not planning to copy the buildings and details that are shown in the pictures. The pictures simply communicate an idea or an impression. These images don’t even have to be consistent with each other. They can show a wide variety of styles and details. Leave it to your architect to find the common threads among the images that inspire you. Inspiration images are truly pictures that are worth a thousand words.”

    The term “inspiration images” comes from my friend Marion Philpotts of Philpotts Associates in Honolulu.

    While you clip your inspiration images, you’ll find yourself thinking more about what you want and don’t want. you’ll feel your vision begin to crystallize. This is good. Jot down notes as ideas occur to you. You might even put everything aside for a day or two and then take a fresh look at it all. Some things that you thought were exactly what you wanted may now not seem as critical. Repeat this process a few times and I think you’ll find yourself developing a consistent vision of your dream house.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    Radon is back in the news. Radio personality Paul Harvey, the New York Times, and other news outlets reported recently that granite countertops pose a threat of emitting radon gas. Radon gas has been purportedly linked to risk of lung cancer. The Marble Institute of America has responded with a scholarly report essentially saying that the radon emissions from granite are so miniscule that they warrant no fears.

    It seems that this report surfaces every ten years, or so. It has been promoted by the makers of competing countertop materials, like quartz products like Cambria or Silestone and solid surfaces like Corian. You can read and listen to the reports for yourself, but it seems to me that this is a Chicken Little issue that grabs the media’s attention and the stone countertop industry then has to spend lots of time and money de-bunking it.

    Personally, I think that the threat presented by radon, in general, is way over-blown. I have never seen a positive, scientific, statistical link between radon levels and actual cases of lung cancer. All I’ve seen is pure speculation and panic prospering propaganda. The literature tells you all of the risks and dangers radon poses without actually showing that any of these dangerous consequences have ever occurred. None of the literature even acknowledges the effects simple ventilation has on dispersing the gas. Radon occurs naturally in the soil and rocks and it comes into a house through the ground. It can not be stopped. Ventilation is the remedy for houses that contain too much radon. The amount of radon that a stone countertop “might” emit is a small fraction of what occurs naturally and opening a door to the kitchen will remove any accumulated radon gas.

    I think this is another example of irresponsible journalism, if you can call it journalism at all.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    Here’s a small, but important tip for placement of recessed lights in ceilings.    

    If you are placing a ceiling fan in the ceiling of a room and you plan on using recessed lights in the ceiling, make sure to keep the lights well away from the blades of the fan. If you don’t do this, the turning blades of the fan will produce a strobe light effect. Of course, if you’re really into disco and yearn for the 80’s, this might be a great thing. but for most of us, this kind of flashing light situation isn’t very good.

    So my general rule is to keep the ceiling lights at least a few feet away from the ends of the fan blades and even more if the fan is suspended farther away from the ceiling.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com