Don’t Design Your Home Without Professional Assistance
Building a new home from scratch has a lot of advantages: you get to build it where you want to live, you avoid structural problems that come with old houses, and you don’t have to remodel rooms to fit your style after moving in.
Despite all this, if you’re not careful, the new home building process can still leave you with significant issues. The actual design of the house is one particular place where you do not want to look for savings with a “DIY” plan. This can doom the project before it begins. There’s a reason the best designers have many years of training and experience. It’s a field requiring expertise and a cultivated taste.
Common problems caused by novice home designs
We can start with the legal issues. Your local building code is unique to where you live, and a Triangle area architect or home designer will know how to avoid code violations. If you were to spend hours clicking and saving free online home plans, you don’t have any guarantee that that project will comply with regulations where you’re building.
Fixing a code violation wastes time and money. This can set the build back and make local officials begin to look more skeptically at your project. Time is a factor in general though. Without professional help, you’re likely to have to do a lot of deep diving on topics you’re not familiar with. Unprofessional design plans can also cause delays as the builders try to make sense of them and verify details.
It can quickly become a case of the “unknown unknowns,” areas where you don’t know even what questions to ask to get the necessary information. Did you know there can be a massive difference in cost based on how you plan the layout of elements like plumbing and HVAC? Do you know what materials to use to maximize energy efficiency? Without sufficient knowledge, you won’t even be searching for solutions to questions you need to be asking.
Using “home design software”
In addition to the abundant free home designs online (designed by hopefully-competent strangers), there is also web-based software that many rely on to produce their plans. Real home designers use software too because it allows for quick modeling of potential layouts. But architectural software in the hands of a professional yields far different results than in the hands of someone being guided by their education, experience, instinct, and impulses.
Most importantly, hiring a design professional is not just about avoiding mistakes; it’s about successfully building your dream home. Sure, you want to build affordably. But the reason you decided to build a new home was that you wanted to make sure it turned out just right. It may seem like a DIY job would keep all the choices in your hands, but in reality, it throws a lot of the variables into chaos.
Those in and around Wendell, Knightdale, Raleigh, Durham, Oxford and Wake Forest can trust Winslow Homes to design and build a beautiful custom home for you. Call us at (919) 556-4700, and we can get started envisioning it together.