How to choose a Home Designer

You found your lot!! The dream situation. And if you’re like us (first time home builders) you’re about to find out how many people are actually involved in designing a custom home. The word “HOME DESIGNER” is FULLY LOADED. 3 key players in our design process. I’m telling you, it takes a village, choose wisely. 🙂 We knew we wanted something no one else has. But along with that comes the tricky part of making it acutally live-able. Soooo, today we are going to show you why you’ll want a structural designer + what they’ll do for you!

Your structural designer (we chose Hyrum Bates) will be the one who is going to help you design the layout of your home, the placement of walls, ceiling dimensions, windows, fixtures, doors, exterior building materials, etc. While they may offer interior design as well, it’s not expected to be part of the structural home design! They’re not engineers and the actual “structural engineering” that you will present to the city + to your builder, will be done separately (with additional costs). A structural designer’s main goal is to give you the house of your dreams – that isn’t like anyone else’s!

I’ve mentioned that we chose our Architectural designer very early on. He’s helped us design 2 homes now. The first one didn’t get approved + after trying to salvage them the best we could, we made a mutual decision to just scrap them + start again. We all worked our tails off to get a second set of plans to pass our neighborhood Design Board + Hyrum Mckay Bates has been super patient in helping walk us through the endless adventures that come along with custom building. He walked through a window meeting with me just this last week.

We’ve put together a few interview questions for you to use as you interview architectural designers that we wish we would have had! We hope you’re able to find the perfect fit for your family!

Interview questions:

How will you help me save money?
How many revisions can I expect?
What kind of designs have you done before?
What will my final drawings look like?
Will I have digital renderings of the inside/outside of my house?
What do you charge and what’s included?- how often will we meet?- how many clients do you take on at once?
What’s expected of me during the process?

Tips for working with a structural designer:

set a standing meeting every week
review your new neighborhood’s ccnr’s and regulations at the very beginning- if possible, include your builder in the meetings
set goals as to square footage and cost early on as in your conversation as well. (these can get out of control fast)
Getting on the same page as early as as you can will allow your desinger to work within the context of what is realistic +/or force them to come up with different ideas that fit your style, while staying within budget.