This guide is intended as a tool for families planning their forever home, first-time custom home clients, small developers and side-hustle builders, and established builders looking for an edge.
It’s for you if…you want a truly custom home, you are willing to learn the process, you want to save money through informed decisions, you want to control design choices, and you enjoy planning and problem solving.
It is not for you if…you want a builder to make evey decision, you want a home stated next month, or you dislike managing projects.
Building a custom home is one of the largest financial investments most families will ever make.
The challenge is that most people only go through the process once.
They may spend months researching appliances, cars, or vacations, yet find themselves making hundreds of design, construction, financing, and land-purchase decisions with little firsthand experience.
My career has allowed me to work in nearly every phase of the residential development process – from design and construction to lending, real estate, and project management.
I have watched successful projects come together, and I’ve seen costly mistakes that could have been avoided with better information at the right time.
The purpose of this site is to help you understand the entire process before you commit significant time and money. From evaluating land and developing floor plans to financing, construction, and project management, you will find practical guidance designed to help you make informed decisions and avoid common pitfalls.
Think of this site as a field guide for one of the most important projects your family will ever undertake.
Steve Workman
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By the end of this series, you’ll know how to:
The best home design complements an existing property. Get the lot first and design the house to fit it, rather than having a plan you like and then shopping around for a lot that fits. (That’s more of a ‘spec’ plan.)
Everyone’s criteria for what makes the ‘perfect’ lot will differ. Meet with your family and write your list of requirements. Divide the items into ‘needs’ and ‘wants’.
When you’re checking off the boxes on a specific piece of property, all of the ‘needs’ boxes need to be checked. You want as many of the ‘want’ boxes checked as possible, though it’s rare to check off everything.
‘Needs’ will include: water, sewer, electricity, internet, price within budget, road access, clear title, sufficient area to accommodate your plan, the right school district, etc.
‘Wants’ might include items such as views, neighborhood amenities, and old-growth trees.
In a future post, we will provide free checklists of everything you need to remember before buying a piece of property.
A successful custom home design balances:
(‘Bumwad’ was our nickname back in architecture school for tracing paper.)
I also plan to walk you through the design of each room in the house in a series of blog posts, videos, and PDF downloads. This is the low-tech method I learned, using a series of tracing-paper overlays.
There are two distinct phases to wo distinct drawing steps are involved in the process:
First, there is a less formal process where you put your ideas down on paper. This is something that happens as you work your way through the design and generally occurs on a series of tracing paper overlays.
The second phase of drawing is more formal and intended to describe your design to the people who issue the building permit, finance the construction, and actually build the thing.
There are many different ways to complete these drawings: you can hire an architect, designer, or draftsperson. You can draw the plans the old-school way with a pencil, or you can use basic CAD software.
We will address these options via a series of blog posts and videos and provide you with the design tools to do it yourself.
We also plan to teach you how to be your own General Contractor, with the goal of saving a lot of money and gaining control over the project.
A General Contractor coordinates all the different subcontractors and suppliers. Our intent is to walk you through the scheduling and sequencing logistics necessary to take the project from ‘dream’ stage up to final move-in.
I understand that doing it yourself can be a scary proposition. Worst case, these lessons will help you understand the process and scheduling if you end up hiring somebody else. (It’s also possible to have a professional homebuilder put up the structural shell and do the finish work yourself. We will go through the options.)
What you will learn in this section:
This is the house that my wife and I designed and built for our family back in 2009.
I plan to use this as the ‘example’ house for the site and share both the good and bad decisions we made along the way.
If you don’t have the down payment money right now, or want a little practice at this before you start your dream home, doing it as a ‘side-hustle’, using other people’s money, is a useful process to learn.
In this section, we will discuss:
As I previously mentioned, one of the primary goals of this site is to help you make the critical decisions to all the questions that come up during this process. The design and construction process is simply a series of decisions.
In addition to a FAQ section at the end of each topic, we plan to have a special section dedicated to those questions.
We also encourage you to join the conversation and ask questions (or offer answers) in our comment sections.
I haven’t seen many residential design and construction forums on line (let me know if you have) and I would welcome making this into kind of a community.
Most people never build their dream home because they assume the process is too complicated.
The truth is that a custom home is simply a series of manageable steps. Learn one step at a time, and the process becomes surprisingly achievable.
