Hiring an Architect

21 Nov 2019 - Tansy Arron-Walker

We’ve never built a house before, and it seems there are a few different ways to go about getting construction documents:

• Buy a ready made plan off the internet. We looked at many many plans and never found one even remotely close to what we wanted.

• Find a builder and look at their book of house plans. We suspected we’d run into the same issue as with the plans off the internet - nothing quite right.

• Do a rough sketch and take it to a draftsman. We considered this, but because we want this house to be both beautiful and functional, we wanted more help than a draftsperson was likely to provide.

• Hire an architect. Find an architect and have them walk you through what you need, what you really want, what would be a cool feature if it fits. The architect works with you on conceptual design - both the floorplan and the exterior, and then turns that into a set of construction documents.

This was what we went with, and I am so, so glad we did. Even though we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted, our architect has made everything more functional, and much, much more beautiful. He’s also been invaluable as a resource for how the building process actually works, what do we need to be thinking about now, before building even starts, and for asking us questions that solidified what we want from our house.

We initally spoke with three architects and eventually decided to work with Chris from Haus.