ᐅ Avoid Mistakes When Building Your Second Home: Builder or Architect?
Created on: 13 Feb 2024 11:39
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RotesDach
Hello forum,
In 2020, we built a new single-family home. However, for various reasons, we are not completely satisfied and are considering building again. We want to take our time with this (time frame 5-10 years) to be really sure about what exactly we want to change. In the meantime, we can also save more equity and observe everyday life with the children. From our experience, daily life with 3-4 children requires a lot of flexibility in the house because the needs of all family members seem to change quickly. That is why we have set quite a long time frame.
When we started planning the house in 2019, we didn’t always make the right decisions in hindsight. With the first and later the second child, and then the lockdown, we could not view or visit everything that was installed beforehand. Also, contact with the architect from the homebuilding company was quite limited. We often simply lacked proper advice.
My question to you is: How can we avoid making the same mistakes again in the next build? We always had to make decisions very quickly and often had no solid basis to decide. We would have liked to have quick access to prices and services; this just wasn’t available. For example, if we planned an additional window or increased the living area, we received a new total price and could only guess how much the extra cost was.
We found that the homebuilding company only builds in the way they usually do, meaning when we asked for something unusual, they said it wasn’t possible. For example, we wanted a large panoramic glass window wall that could slide open barrier-free. They said this wasn’t possible for structural reasons in our house. It seemed likely that our builder simply did not have this kind of feature in their program, or the profit margin on such a request was too low for them.
What frustrates me most is the roof. It is not usable as living space. It is a low pyramid roof made of nail plate trusses. There is not enough standing height for living space, and the structure is not suitable for conversion. We never discussed the roof with the architect at the time. The catalog house our free planning was based on originally had a gable roof—exactly what we would wish for today. The architect kept talking about a "town villa" we would be building, and we eventually adopted that term. As laypeople, we understood that as a house with two full floors. However, the architect from the building company implied a pyramid roof by "town villa." The change from the original gable roof to this non-convertible pyramid roof was never communicated to us, and we realized this far too late. Sure, you could say we should have noticed, but at some point, we just wanted to finish the project. The two-year construction period with two small children was really exhausting.
For the second build, we want to do everything right or make as few mistakes as possible, so we are allowing ourselves a much longer time for advance planning. We certainly will not build with the same homebuilding company again.
BUT: Is this the typical experience with standard (prefabricated) homebuilders? If you want something special like panoramic window walls, is it better to go to an architect? They are usually paid hourly. I worry that an architect might overall be the more expensive option. If we do go with a homebuilder, should we choose one that specializes in our style? For example, Huf-Haus comes to mind, but they are also very expensive.
Maybe someone here has had similar experiences with poor communication and advice, especially during the corona period?
Is there another solution besides a homebuilding company or an architect that we haven’t thought of? We just want to be involved in every decision and not be treated like we were the first time.
If what you want is above the average in size and features, does it make more sense economically to hire an architect than to modify a catalog house so much that it only ends up being more expensive?
Thanks for reading. I know this post is long.
In 2020, we built a new single-family home. However, for various reasons, we are not completely satisfied and are considering building again. We want to take our time with this (time frame 5-10 years) to be really sure about what exactly we want to change. In the meantime, we can also save more equity and observe everyday life with the children. From our experience, daily life with 3-4 children requires a lot of flexibility in the house because the needs of all family members seem to change quickly. That is why we have set quite a long time frame.
When we started planning the house in 2019, we didn’t always make the right decisions in hindsight. With the first and later the second child, and then the lockdown, we could not view or visit everything that was installed beforehand. Also, contact with the architect from the homebuilding company was quite limited. We often simply lacked proper advice.
My question to you is: How can we avoid making the same mistakes again in the next build? We always had to make decisions very quickly and often had no solid basis to decide. We would have liked to have quick access to prices and services; this just wasn’t available. For example, if we planned an additional window or increased the living area, we received a new total price and could only guess how much the extra cost was.
We found that the homebuilding company only builds in the way they usually do, meaning when we asked for something unusual, they said it wasn’t possible. For example, we wanted a large panoramic glass window wall that could slide open barrier-free. They said this wasn’t possible for structural reasons in our house. It seemed likely that our builder simply did not have this kind of feature in their program, or the profit margin on such a request was too low for them.
What frustrates me most is the roof. It is not usable as living space. It is a low pyramid roof made of nail plate trusses. There is not enough standing height for living space, and the structure is not suitable for conversion. We never discussed the roof with the architect at the time. The catalog house our free planning was based on originally had a gable roof—exactly what we would wish for today. The architect kept talking about a "town villa" we would be building, and we eventually adopted that term. As laypeople, we understood that as a house with two full floors. However, the architect from the building company implied a pyramid roof by "town villa." The change from the original gable roof to this non-convertible pyramid roof was never communicated to us, and we realized this far too late. Sure, you could say we should have noticed, but at some point, we just wanted to finish the project. The two-year construction period with two small children was really exhausting.
For the second build, we want to do everything right or make as few mistakes as possible, so we are allowing ourselves a much longer time for advance planning. We certainly will not build with the same homebuilding company again.
BUT: Is this the typical experience with standard (prefabricated) homebuilders? If you want something special like panoramic window walls, is it better to go to an architect? They are usually paid hourly. I worry that an architect might overall be the more expensive option. If we do go with a homebuilder, should we choose one that specializes in our style? For example, Huf-Haus comes to mind, but they are also very expensive.
Maybe someone here has had similar experiences with poor communication and advice, especially during the corona period?
Is there another solution besides a homebuilding company or an architect that we haven’t thought of? We just want to be involved in every decision and not be treated like we were the first time.
If what you want is above the average in size and features, does it make more sense economically to hire an architect than to modify a catalog house so much that it only ends up being more expensive?
Thanks for reading. I know this post is long.
W
WilderSueden17 Feb 2024 09:22RotesDach schrieb:
Next time, I would take the advice to maximize the building envelope and build a bit more elongated. Thanks for this tip, @ WilderSueden. I don’t think my suggestion was to build more elongated, even though square-shaped houses tend to create a lot of unused space in the middle. That’s fine as long as half of the living room is occupied by the Duplo train; later on, though, it just becomes dead space.
Personally, I also like our L-shaped open space—it’s nice and practical—but of course, that limits how many other rooms you can have on the ground floor.
RotesDach schrieb:
Hmm, I’m wondering if I would really save square meters by turning our bedroom—which is just one large (multi-functional) space, with functions that can be repeatedly adapted to our changing daily life (including with children)—into several separate rooms. I believe you end up with more circulation space, more walls, more doors, and more complexity. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But this is the reason behind our preference for larger multi-functional rooms rather than more wall surface in smaller rooms. In an extreme case, you could save even more wall space by installing exhaust hoods above the shower and toilet and integrating them into the loft design. However, the view would then encompass one giant uninterrupted surface, on which you would probably perceive even more than in this example...
RotesDach schrieb:
But our open-plan room is a rectangle with a net area of 5.50 x 10m (18 x 33 ft). And it’s fully furnished. I would be happy to have even one square meter (about 10 square feet) of “air” where no piece of furniture stands, just empty space or perhaps just a rug. ...every single speck would be seen as a disturbance of the "pure emptiness." Spanning this space without supporting columns would also be a great opportunity to spend even more budget on reinforced concrete than you already did with your (failed) panoramic window. However, with a room concept aimed at giving “as much open space as possible” to every stakeholder in family living, I would have given the children rooms suitable for tree houses.
The more defenses I read from you for your “you can basically change everything later” concept of your house, the clearer it becomes that I withdraw my advice to embark on the building adventure again. If you cannot decide whether to do things differently next time regarding what others with different tastes see as “mistakes” in your current house (and which you also partly agree with, or you wouldn’t be unhappy about it), or if you want to build the same again, then a new attempt is unlikely to achieve a better overall result.
Based on my current judgment, at least your “Stockholm self” would build the same house with a pitched roof and fewer posts in the window front, possibly with an uneven rectangular floor plan. Even thinking about such an inefficient effort-to-gain ratio would make Pareto turn in his grave. But maybe your children will say, “For treehouse rooms, you should do it after all.”
https://www.instagram.com/11antgmxde/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bauen-jetzt/
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RotesDach17 Feb 2024 16:35Well, well, @11ant, don’t make our house sound worse than it actually is. Of course, there are things we don’t like and would plan differently today. That’s exactly why this thread exists. But if everything about our house were as bad as you say or maybe feel, every day here would be filled with overwhelming misery. I can assure you, that is not the case.
To touch on something else: How do you find the right architect? One who brings creative ideas and is willing to think completely outside the box. For us, the first design concept was developed fairly quickly and remained basically the same in overall structure. I believe the initial draft was very much influenced by our own (really very first amateur) ideas. Then it was always like: “Yes, but you wanted this or that.” Do you know what I mean? How can you test this without paying an enormous amount of architect fees upfront? I’ve also heard that you can have two architects compete against each other, kind of like a public tender. Is that common for private building projects as well?
To touch on something else: How do you find the right architect? One who brings creative ideas and is willing to think completely outside the box. For us, the first design concept was developed fairly quickly and remained basically the same in overall structure. I believe the initial draft was very much influenced by our own (really very first amateur) ideas. Then it was always like: “Yes, but you wanted this or that.” Do you know what I mean? How can you test this without paying an enormous amount of architect fees upfront? I’ve also heard that you can have two architects compete against each other, kind of like a public tender. Is that common for private building projects as well?
RotesDach schrieb:
To bring up something different again: How do you find the right architect? One who brings creative ideas and thinks completely outside the box. Regarding question 1: You find one by searching yourself. Or through a consultant* who doesn’t have any personal interests and represents your interests. Definitely not through a builder, who has his own interests.
*) but in this case, for the sake of my health, please not me
Regarding question 2: By not trying to influence their creativity and letting them think freely. That also means ...
RotesDach schrieb:
For us, the initial draft was ready quite quickly and largely stayed as it was. I believe the first draft was heavily influenced by our (really very first, amateur) ideas. ... politely keeping your own amateur ideas tucked away — at least until the architect has presented their design and you have had several nights to think it over.
RotesDach schrieb:
How can you test that without paying an enormous architect’s fee right away? I also heard somewhere that you can basically have two architects compete against each other, a bit like a public tender. Is something like that common for private building projects? Competition. Contest. Casting. *laughs loudly*. No, for a single-family house *ahem* that is "not common."
An enormous fee, no. For Module A we’re talking about 9 percentage points of the HOAI fee. Or you ask the countless student architects and architect candidates who’d rather earn money this way than waiting tables or driving taxis. Then you can look for a cost-effective "@RotesDach next super architect."
https://www.instagram.com/11antgmxde/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bauen-jetzt/
O
Odyssee7718 Feb 2024 00:01I have now read the entire thread for the second time and I can’t shake the feeling that you’re starting to look for solutions in the wrong place.
Point 1:
What are the specific aspects that you are not satisfied with? Please list them and illustrate these points using the current floor plan. I keep reading that the bedroom turned out great. Is everything else not working? If you want to make adjustments, you need to be clear beforehand about what you want to achieve. Do you even know that?
Point 2:
Create a list of requirements for what a new house must be able to do and what your needs are, for example:
- One or two home workspaces?
- Additional separate guest room or combined with an office?
- Number of children’s rooms and bathrooms
- Separate walk-in closet?
- Etc.
With this information, it becomes the task of an architect—not a draftsman—to design a floor plan...
Point 1:
RotesDach schrieb:
However, for various reasons we are not completely satisfied and are considering building again. But we want to take our time (time frame 5-10 years) so that we are really sure about what exactly we want to change.
What are the specific aspects that you are not satisfied with? Please list them and illustrate these points using the current floor plan. I keep reading that the bedroom turned out great. Is everything else not working? If you want to make adjustments, you need to be clear beforehand about what you want to achieve. Do you even know that?
Point 2:
Create a list of requirements for what a new house must be able to do and what your needs are, for example:
- One or two home workspaces?
- Additional separate guest room or combined with an office?
- Number of children’s rooms and bathrooms
- Separate walk-in closet?
- Etc.
With this information, it becomes the task of an architect—not a draftsman—to design a floor plan...
R
RotesDach18 Feb 2024 00:0211ant schrieb:
For module A, we are talking about 9 percentage points of the HOAI fee.How much would that be for, say, 800,000 for the house? It’s correct that the fee is calculated based on the house price, right?Similar topics