What To Do With All That Free Advice On Building A New Home

So you have decided to build yourself a custom home, you've found the perfect piece of property and you have hired an architect to create your dream onto paper. But everywhere you go, everyone you talk to has an opinion about what you are doing and a suggestion on what you should build in terms of style, materials, functionality, placement and building techniques.

You will receive so much unsolicited advice from people "who know", the longer you listen to the advice the more confused you will become as after a while it will start to conflict with each other.

You will be told the best way to keep the house dry from rain, the best way to position windows to deal with the sun, the best way to layout your kitchen, the only way to plan out your bathrooms, best way to construct the walls, the best way to insulate. Then people will tell you that the insulation that you were to told to use is not good, that there have been "so called problems" that its dangerous, that this type of window doesn't last, etc, etc, etc.

These people will be your friends, neighbours, brothers, sisters and all manners of relations. You will also get advice from people you don't know, friends of friends and everyone will tell you how "you have too do it this way, there's no other way!"

If you take all this advice to heart and decide to use it then you will be so confused that you will be paralyzed when it comes to making real decisions about your new home.

What you need to do is limit the amount of information from other sources to a minimum, you can listen to people, thank them and move along.

Who should really be listening too?

You should be listening to professionals, there are a lot of professionals out there, you will meet enough of them before your done building your new custom home that you don't need outside advise.

When I say professionals I mean your Architect, Interior Designer and of course your Builder. The sub-trades that the builder brings in are also good to listen too on certain issues.

Your Builder is the most important person, they are the one person that you should be listening too. If you hired the right builder then you should have no reason to not trust what your builder is saying to you. Remember that the builder has the most hands on practical experience with how your house functions, fits together and works for the people living in it.

If you have questions about parts or all of the house and its construction ask your builder, a good builder likes a lot of questions, when a homeowner asks a lot of questions that means that the homeowner is engaged in the build and they trust their builder enough to ask them important questions.

This type of relationship between builder and client is very healthy and important in the home building project.

So when you are given all that free unsolicited advice from everybody just smile and nod, once your new custom home is built then you can become that person giving advice that nobody asked for!

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.

Renovate and Expand or Build A Brand New Cottage

Should I renovate and add an addition or should Demolish the entire home and go with an entire new home?

This is a question homeowners struggle with all the time, especially when it is someones cottage. A place where memories were made with children and family.

Other then the sentimental value of the existing cottage it becomes hard to justify spending the large sum of money to build a new cottage when its isn't used as much as your permanent home back in the city.

You should ask yourself some important questions and then think about the sentimental value of the place;

• Can you afford to build a new cottage?
• If you tear down the existing cottage will you still be able to build what you want on your lot with the current new building restrictions and codes.
• How much do you use your cottage? Would it be used more by the family and more of the year if it was properly heated and properly insulated?
• Would you consider ever retiring into the place when the time came?
• Are you planning to sell it when you no longer require it anymore?
• Will you be compromising on the layout and functionality of the cottage by only renovating and adding square feet instead of building new?
• If you were to change the configuration of the home with either an addition or a new build would you change the view that you currently have, for better or worse?
• Would this upset your neighbour's or would they be happy for the new look of your cottage?
• Do you require a lot more room and storage?
• You should factor in the energy saving's over the next ten years if you were to build a new cottage compared to keeping the older one even if its renovated.

The biggest thing you will have to deal with is the money issue, almost any building no matter in how bad a shape can be saved, the only barrier is the money, You should really look at the amount of money you are willing to spend on expanding and renovating, if that number ends up being fairly large then maybe you should just consider a brand new home.

One other thing about a brand new cottage is that you reduce your maintenance costs for the next 15 years to almost zero.

In the end your contractor can't tell you what to do only you can make that decision.

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.

Value Engineering Your New Home

Value Engineering: A Short History

General Electric introduced value engineering to its factories during WWII. Supply shortages during the war forced GE to get creative to meet wartime demand. To their delight, replacement alloys for steel often led to better production at a reduced cost.
These value-engineering campaigns were so successful that GE continued this approach after the war in their commercial lines. Other industries followed suit, and value engineering made it into the home construction industry in the early 1970s.

Value Engineering when dealing with residential home construction is about the same as any other industry.

When you are building a custom home for a client you are going to want to stepback and take a big picture look at the home and what you and the client are attempting to achieve. You want to make sure that the money you spend in one place will pay itself back in the future either through resale or through savings ie: in energy.

For example;

When constructing your new home your home builder will give you the option to adding more insulation into the building envelope. There are all kinds of ways of doing this and they all come with pro's and con's and also with differing price tags. What you and your building need to decide on is how much more do you want to spend on your insulation to save future money on energy use. If you spend the maximum on insulation then you will be saving the maximum amount of money on energy use going into the future. But because you spend a larger portion of money to install all that extra insulation the time that it will take to be paid back to you will be longer. Some options of insulation are so expensive that you will have to look at recouping your loses decades into the future where spending less on the insulation might have a payback of only 5 or 6 years. It all depends on what you are using for energy (gas, propane, electricity) and how you think the overall price of that energy is going to rise and at what rate. If you heat your home with electricity and you believe that the electricity rate is going to climb significantly then you might want to spend a lot more on insulation so that the return is better on your lowered electricity costs. 

All of these choices need to be decided on before you build the entire home, adding in the type of heating system, the positioning of the house on the property, the material that is used to build the house and quality that it is all done will all come in to play when value engineering your new home.

Make sure that you hire a general contractor that can do this for you and you will be able to balance the spending of monies and the savings of monies well into the future.

Rob Abbott

Village Builders Inc.