Don’t overplay your hand. You might be holding all the cards right now, since every builder is very hungry for work. But pushing too hard can cause the builder to dig in and not want to negotiate no matter what. Effective negotiations should always leave both parties, the builder and yourself, feeling each came out well and didn’t have to give up too much.

My advice is that when you are negotiating, you need to always give the builder a comfortable reason to adjust his bid without him feeling like he is simply changing his number. No builder wants to be seen as saying, “I was trying to charge you that higher amount, but now that you’re pushing me a little, I’d be happy to only charge you this much.” It makes it look like he was trying to gouge the customer in the first place. So my suggestion is to always change the scope of the project a little bit, or suggest the builder ask his subs or suppliers if there is any way they can reduce the costs of the work. That way the builder can come back to you and say, “Now that we deleted the fancy tiles the cost has come down…” or “I really pushed my subs and got you these savings…”  This lets the builder be the hero in getting you a better price, even if part of the reduction actually came from their own anticipated profit. They never have to say they cut their price, even if they did.

One other good tactic is to simply say, “I have a couple of prices and we are going to make a decision tomorrow. Please give me your last, best price to help with the decision.” This opens another opportunity for the builder to trim his profit without setting a new precedent he may not want to be publicly known. But you’ll still get the benefit of the discount he quietly created for you.

Another good approach is to evaluate the price they gave you, determine what you think the price should be, maybe three to five percent less, and then say to the builder, “I need to get this price to “X” or else I can’t go ahead. If you can do something to tweak you price to “X”, I’ll sign the contract.” Of course, in this scenario, you need to actually be ready to sign the contract. Your target number needs to be realistic, too.

Some cost savings can come from simple changes that make the builder’s work easier to do or coordinate, yet still give you the end result you are wanting. I always ask the builder for his suggestions and ask him to identify any places we might be spending too much without a compensating benefit. I do this even if the price was below our budget. You never want to overspend unwittingly.

Negotiating with both parties interests in mind will get you a great price and leave the builder happy to have gotten the job. When everyone is happy, the work always turns out better.

Have you had success or an interesting experience with builder negotiations? Post a comment and share it with us.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

I refer to siding, brick, stone, stucco, and other sidings as the “weatherproofing” of the house. These materials keep the bulk of the wind and water out, but even perfectly installed siding material will still let in small, but significant, amounts of moisture. There is no effective way to stop this and it does not indicate the house is poorly built.

Do you remember the old black tar paper that used to be installed around a house before the siding was installed? That layer is the actual barrier against water infiltration. It is the true waterproofing of a house. These days, tar paper has been replaced with several high-tech House Wraps, like Tyvek and Typar by DuPont, Weathermate by Dow, and PinkWrap by Owens Corning.

Materials such as these have revolutionized house waterproofing. Much more resistant to moisture infiltration than old fashioned tar paper, these materials substantially improve the energy performance of the house, as well. By reducing the air infiltration in exterior frame walls, particularly on windy days, these high-tech house wraps help the building insulation remain effective. All insulation works on the principle of dead air being the actual insulator. The insulation simply keeps the air still so it can insulate. You can imagine that if air is moving around in the wall cavity, the “R” value (insulating value) is going to be lost. The house wraps keep wind from penetrating the walls and compromising the insulation’s effectiveness. House wraps will save you a lot of money in heating and cooling costs.

When the windows and doors of a house are installed, the house wrap is taped to the window and door frames with special tape to insure a tight seal. When this is done and the roof has been installed on the house, the house is watertight, regardless of whether any of the siding has been installed. The siding material is there to protect the house wrap, deflect the heavy weather, and for looks.

If your house is being built in a cold climate and you are worried about brick, stone, or stucco being installed in freezing conditions, you don’t have to delay the start of construction. You can begin the house, provided weather permits the foundation to be built, and let the builder frame everything. He can install the roofing, install the windows, and wrap the house up with one of the house wraps. The house will be watertight and the interior construction can continue. The masonry on the exterior can wait until warmer weather without delaying the rest of the construction.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

It can cost a lot of money to sell a house and move. Realtor fees and moving expenses can cost as much as a total kitchen makeover. So why not save the real estate commissions and moving expenses which, once spent, are gone and can never be recovered. Instead, put the money into something you can use and enjoy, something tangible like a great new kitchen or a luxurious master bathroom.

Many people were saving money in their retirement accounts to use to build or buy their home retirement. Their current homes were good for raising children, but now that the children are gone, the upstairs master bedroom and other accessibility considerations make the house inappropriate for aging occupants. But retirement accounts have taken big hits. That loss of their assets combined with the decline in value of their current house has many people finding themselves unable to afford the retirement house they dreamed of. So instead of retiring to the house of their dreams, more and more people are remodeling their current houses to be the kind of house that works for them.

This can be done by adding a ground floor master bedroom suite to permit single level living, altering and enhancing master baths to allow handicapped access and added convenience, making alterations to remove other steps within the house or at the doors, and updating the house to include the conveniences and amenities people now want and need. Formal dining rooms can be converted into home offices or libraries and studies. Screened porches, patios, and outdoor kitchens can be added to change a home from a growing family type of house to a leisure living home. Even face-lift makeovers to change the appearance of the house and re-landscaping to reduce yard maintenance can be done.

There are other intangible benefits to remodeling beyond the financial and lifestyle benefits. Staying in the neighborhood where your doctors, banks, favorite stores, churches, clubs, and friends are can make staying put a lot more gratifying than pulling up stakes and relocating. If you don’t think your present house is good for your golden years, think again. You might have the nucleus of a wonderful leisure living house right beneath your feet.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    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

    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?

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    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.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    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.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    One of our stops on the tour was the Chapel of the Holy Cross

Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, Arizona

     You can see how this interesting piece of architecture is designed to be integral to the rocks. It’s simplicity of form is inspiring. The architecture is minimal making its impact grand.

    But when you stand next to the Chapel of the Holy Cross and look out to the distant rock formations, this is what you see.

A McMansion in Sedona, Arizona

    Yes, it is the poster child for McMansions. Were they trying to mimic the rock formation? I just find this to be inexplicable. By the way, the dome in the center is an observatory that opens to let you view the night sky. But I might be wrong on that. It could actually be a vortex catcher!

    I’ll file this one away in the “more dollars than sense” department.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

Dream House Fumble #3

    Does the brick look “glued on” to you? It does to me. Brick is a heavy, solid material that is the actual structure of thousands and thousands of buildings that date back to the Romans. It is a material that should express its strength and it should not be used as a “detail” material or a wall facing, like vinyl siding.

    In this house, the item that really caught my eye and drove me to snap this picture and show it to you is the “key”, or “keystone” at the top of the half-round. A key is the wedge shaped block at the 12:00 o’clock position. Originally, in masonry arches, the key was the last stone set. It secured the arch structurally, making it capable of supporting considerable loads across an open span. In classic detailing, the key in an arch often was mimicked when the arch was built of wood. It retained it’s psychological quality of “locking” the structure together.

    In our example here, the arch is made of brick, the key is made of wood, and there is no key at all in the brickwork! The brick absolutely denies its structural properties. If it were structural, it would collapse. As a result, the brick appears as simply an applied material that serves as mere siding. The entire look is visually abrasive and dissonant. This window would have been much more successful if the wooden key had been omitted and a brick or cast stone key had been installed in the brickwork.

    While we’re at it, I could point out other strange details, like the excessive width of the window trim and the awful half-round fan detail above the center window. I suppose that was put there to replace a more expensive true fan window. A real window would have made a great difference for only a couple of hundred dollars. Wouldn’t it be worth it right on the front of the house? I will give them credit for placing the downspouts around the corner and not running them right on top of the brick quoins. Ironically, the quoins are costly and enhance the expression of strength in the masonry. Better to have ditched the quoins and done the window and arch properly.

   You may think this is a little picky. But this is what separates a good house from a marginal house. The details make the difference.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

     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