Home Sizes

Well sort of on the lines of another post I made, I read an article in the Fargo Forum about "not so big" homes. Interesting thing is this architect was born in England so she's quite familiar with efficient layout of homes as in Europe you don't get many gigantarian 2500 sq ft homes that seem to be the norm in the US the last 10 years. Not that I have anything against people building them if they want to and have the means to.  My idea is you don't need to, because if a properly executed plan to have a home that you can expand and grow you can save yourself a lot of money.  And really do you need a living room, family room and dining room and lately this trend has been becoming the norm with what is called the great room.

But so many people associate living in a small house with cookie cutter houses which leads me to my next point why anyone would spend $120,000 on a house that looks like everyone else in the neighborhood??  I think somehow some of these large home builders that build them have conditioned the human race to believe that this is the only way, and I would guess it comes from larger cities where developers (who are often home builders directly or indirectly) are in control of what goes on those lots. Think back to when American middle class built homes that weren't the same.  Driving around Hillsboro I see houses (1500 sf or less even?) that look similar and most likely were built by the same builder hence giving them the same character but still different?  Maybe they're more similar than they seem because they're not next door to each other I don't know, but that's besides the point there are a bunch of houses in between which are around the same size/year, but different and separates them so it doesn't feel so cookie cutterish!

Most home builders use some form of cookie cutter anyways, and granted it's a way to keep costs down to make affordable homes because they know what to expect and know exactly how much goes into a house they've built before.  But it goes back to having a well planned out plan, notice how I keep going back to plan?!, to execute.  This area is horrible at having that done.  You can practically get your house built off a 8 1/2 x 11 sketch, your putting a lot of faith into someone doing it right and probably putting a lot of extra dough into it that you wouldn't need to, to achieve the same results. Hence the reason why people should research and plan until they're blue in the face and make sure their plan is executed to their desires and not the general contractors.

So this all wraps up with what kind of plan (blueprint/specs/contracts) you have.  The less specific you get the more you leave yourself open to change orders because someone interprets the plan differently than what you intended, once it's in physically they will not change it usually, unless you can put forth a specific plan that says otherwise!, without coughing up some dough! Change Orders are almost always an automatic cha-ching in any level of construction so you start adding all the cha-chings up the food chain of construction (supplier-subcontractor-general contractor in some cases!) that can be a lot of molah out of your pocket!  It's kind of like a legal form of scamming they hook you with a "sob story"(bad plan) and then they make off with your money with the change orders. That's were someone like me who would hate to see you seperated from your hard earned cash (unless you're feeling charitable I have a bank account you can deposit it into! :-D) for poor plans you can always contact me to find out more!