The 7 Crucial & Often Overlooked Decisions You Can Make Before Building Your Dream Home: Part I

You are the General Manager of your homebuilding team.

Your Architect is the Coach. The Coach writes the playbook.

Your General Contractor is the Captain. The Captain manages the players to execute the playbook.

Consider what happens if your Coach does not share the playbook until game time.

Alternatively, imagine your Coach engages the players to help write the playbook. To share in the vision of team and deliver your best version of home.

By choosing the design-build team structure, you enable greater communication and collaboration.

Regardless of the way you choose to structure your team, there are 7 important decisions you can make early on in the design phase that will lead to a more seamless and successful project.

Decision #1: Millwork

Millwork is one of the most overlooked decisions that can be made sooner in the design process.

Simply put, millwork includes baseboard, casing, and crown moulding. It also includes several other decorative woodwork products, such as architrave, chair rail, and panel mould

At a minimum, identifying the height of the casing and crown you prefer (or if you want to omit them entirely) will arm your architect with more information when they draw up your plans.

Today, a lot of design effort goes towards creating efficient floor plans that maximize every square inch of space. By identifying your millwork preferences sooner, your architect can be mindful of exactly how wide the various openings throughout your home need to be.

Additionally, to effectively build more intricate millwork designs, such as the panel moulding pictured above, requires careful coordination with the mechanicals of your home.

To start moving mechanicals, especially after drywall, is extremely cumbersome and expensive. It can affect as many as 10 different trades and hurts the morale of the project. Name someone who likes redoing their work.

All of this can be mitigated by careful and thoughtful planning.

When you begin the exciting process of designing your dream home, spend considerable time researching your options, identifying your preferences, and shaping your individual interior design ethos. The goal is to build confidence in your decision making so you can instill that same confidence in your team.

As your home starts to take shape in the field and you walk through the spaces you once envisioned on paper, you will begin to understand why this is truly one of the most rewarding experiences.