Real Estate Investing Adventures

Design Meeting Agenda

We actually had our design kick-off meeting at the site. We wanted to combine the kick-off meeting with a joint meeting with our contractor to “site” the house or decide where on the lot the house would be placed. It is important to do this right the first time so you don’t run into problems that cause either project delays or costly solutions that could have been easily solved in the beginning. In addition, this development required a tree survey be done of the property that showed what trees would actually have to be cut to accommodate your building, drive and site improvements. We needed to site the house to get our building layout approved and get the design actually started.

We covered the following topics in our design kick-off meeting:

• Scope of the design
• Styles, features and finishes we liked
• Styles, features and finishes we did not want
• Quality level
• Schedule milestones
• Expected deliverables
• Invoicing procedures

Essentially this was to be a very high end home. Reclaimed heartwood pine floors, exposed trusses and beams, a large amount wood walls and ceilings, lots of glass on the lakeside, spare no expense kitchen, extensive architectural lighting, decadent master bath, etc. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have a false start with the design and that we were all aligned on expectations.

Potential Problem

This is the meeting where we received our first big “surprise”. If you remember from a previous post, our initial financial model had us building a custom home at 3,200 SF for a price of $200/SF. We had told the architect the house had to be a minimum 4 bedroom, 3 ½ bath with walk-in closets, a large kitchen, a two story great room, 2 car garage, and a game room. The architect let us know that he didn’t think he could get everything we wanted into the house, produce the exterior look we wanted and keep it at or under 3,200 SF.  That could be a problem! We left it with him to produce some conceptual layouts to see where we stood, but we couldn’t afford a significant increase in overall square footage.

Siting the Building

The contractor met with us and we walked through siting the building with the architect. There are lots of decisions and trade-offs to be made when siting a building. These lots were steeply sloped down to the lake. Typically you wanted to get the house as close to the water as allowed by the development’s setback requirements. That way you can drive up and down the steep driveway in car and don’t have to walk as far from your house to your boat dock. However, the further down the slope you place the house, the more you will pay for the increased length of the driveway and for the utility runs feeding the home. In addition, all the homes are on septic systems. You don’t want to place the home so far down the slope that you can’t place the drainfield in front of or downhill from the home. If the house was placed right up to the setback, you will have to pump the sanitary up to the drainfield on the other side of the house. This is an added expense and can be a maintenance problem.

Other considerations are the views from the home of the lake and mountains. Typically the higher up the slope the better. In addition, you need to relate the home to the water, the morning sun, the setting sun, what the views will look like when homes on either side of it are built, and the overall look or curb appeal of the home. Are there certain trees you want to keep? What do the slopes look like and how does the natural land drain? There is actually quite a bit to consider. We agreed on the placement of the house and turned the architect loose to produce those concept drawings.