When we built our acreage, almost every part of that house went through the full design process. One part didn’t. I look at it every time I come home.
The front steps never got much attention during design. They weren’t ignored exactly. They were the thing near the bottom of the list that we kept meaning to come back to.
Then one day our contractor was on site and said he could pour them tomorrow.
We Did the Work And Just Didn’t Do the Looking
So we designed them in a rush. And the part that matters is that we did do the work. We drew an elevation. We did a rendering. Those steps got the same documents every other part of the house got.
What they didn’t get was the time. Nobody sat with them, turned them around, or asked what happens when you’re coming up them with an armful of groceries in February. I looked at the rendering and said yep, looks good.
They don’t come out far enough. And we didn’t heat them, which in Saskatchewan is a decision you get to reconsider every single winter.
Call it a $10,000 mistake. One detail, on a house where everything else went through the full process.
That’s roughly what a chunk of a design fee costs, spent on one thing I figured was simple.
The Documents Are the Output, But the Looking Is the Work
This is the part people get wrong about design, and I got it wrong on my own house, so I’m not throwing stones.
It’s easy to assume the Design Phase produces a stack of drawings, and that the drawings are the thing you paid for. They’re not. They’re the record of a few hundred decisions that each got examined properly. The examining is what you’re buying. The drawings are just where it gets written down.
My steps had drawings. Real ones. What they were missing was somebody spending an hour being annoying about them, which is exactly the hour that would have caught both problems.
The Same Thing Happens With the Budget
Ten thousand dollars is the small version. The same principle runs at every scale, and at the top of the scale it’s the number that scares people most.
When a home is fully designed, scoped and priced before construction, you sometimes find out the house you described is two hundred thousand dollars more than you want to spend.
That is a good day.
Nothing has been built and nothing has been ordered, so you can shrink the footprint, simplify the roofline, change the window package, phase the basement development, or decide the bonus room was never that important. Every one of those is a conversation and a redraw. You revise until the number works, and then you build the house you can actually afford.
Now find out the same thing halfway through construction. The foundation is in, so the footprint is decided. The trusses are up, so the roofline is decided. The windows arrived last month and they’re not going back. What you have left is a change order, a schedule hit, and a decision about which room you’re going to finish badly.
It’s the same $200,000 either way. What changes is how many of your options are still open when you hear about it.
Why It Takes as Long as It Takes
People ask why the Design Phase runs as long as it does, and this is the honest answer. It takes that long because that’s how long it takes to look at everything properly, including the parts nobody would think to worry about.
The front entry. The mudroom bench height. Which way the pantry door swings when your hands are full. Where the hose bib goes so you’re not dragging a hose across the deck. None of those are exciting, and every one of them is something you live with for thirty years.
I got off easy. My version cost ten grand and it’s a set of steps I have opinions about every time I walk up them. It could just as easily have been the kitchen.
So here’s the question worth asking yourself, and it’s the one I should have asked: what’s the part of your build you’ve already decided is simple?
If you’re early in the process and want to know what else tends to get decided too fast, our free guide 7 Things to Know Before Building Your Custom Home walks through the parts of a build that surprise people most. You can download it on our website.
