Introduction to The World of Design: Key Insights for Homeowners

Watch on YouTube:

Order your copy of The Awakened Homeowner book: https://books2read.com/u/bpxj76

Follow Bill:

https://www.instagram.com/theawakenedhomeowner/

https://www.facebook.com/theawakenedhomeowner/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVDkS64uOHE73ATtFjrjy0g

Join Bill Reid from The Awakened Homeowner as he introduces 'The World of Design' series from the stunning Sierra Nevada mountains. Learn how the design phase is crucial for successful project execution, from hiring professionals like architects and interior designers to understanding the design process, budget management, and the importance of detailed plans. Bill emphasizes the homeowner's role in achieving their dream home by making informed decisions early on. This episode covers everything from the different types of design professionals to navigating permits and approvals. Don't miss out on these valuable insights to ensure your home's construction or renovation project is a success.

00:00 Introduction and Setting the Scene

00:29 Preparing for Your Project Journey

00:59 The World of Design: An Overview

01:26 Understanding Design Professionals

02:04 Engaging with Architects and Designers

02:29 The Design Process Explained

03:06 Design Limitations and Constraints

03:50 Understanding Plans and Blueprints

04:23 Approvals and Permits

05:13 Recap and Next Steps

06:36 Back in the Studio: Deep Dive into Design

08:26 The Role of a Conductor in Your Project

11:31 The Funnel of Design

13:34 The Importance of Quality Design

18:40 The Design Team and Their Roles

28:22 Avoiding Scope Creep and Budget Mismanagement

32:29 Upcoming Episodes and Final Thoughts

38:15 Conclusion and Contact Information

Mentioned in this episode:

The Awakened Homeowner Book

The Awakened Homeowner Book

Climbing mountains isn't much different than tackling a project, so I figured why not? Let's get started with it. Over the past month or so, as if you've been listening and watching, I've been preparing you for your climb, for your hike, and I'm gonna continue on with that mission in this next series.

And that's where the designers come in. So the world of design. It is made up of a few segments that we're gonna go through, and the first one is called Understanding designers, understanding Architects and Understanding Design Professionals. And there's a variety of different design professionals that will apply to your project.

The next the next one is how do you go about coming to an agreement with an architect? A lot of architects and designers have standard design agreements that they use, but there's different varieties of them, and they're usually tailored to different types of projects or different types of clientele.

So it's important that you understand the differences between those so that you can ask the right questions. Once we understand the architects, the design professionals, and how you engage with them, the next thing is called the design process. And this isn't something that I. Invented. This is a methodology that professional architects and designers use.

So before you even start your project, before you even call an architect, you already have design limitations that are built in. Most of them stem from your city or county. Government, not to mention the budget. We know that's gonna be a constraint, but there's certain rules and regulations that apply, a lot of 'em that apply to especially new construction projects or substantial remodels or renovations.

And that's gonna be a multi episode. Series, which will probably be move over to more of a webinar presentation so that I can show you the ins and outs of the plans. The other one that comes to mind that we're gonna cover is approvals and permits. So all of this work that goes on from the day of the inspiration to creating the design and plans.

It's ultimately working towards submitting them to your city or county, and it's good for you to know that what that process is like and what is required to go through that process. Even if you're a D Iyer or an owner builder, and you're gonna be coordinating a lot of this yourself, it's important for you to know this so that you can circumvent any challenges that come into play.

Studying your finances, creating a package so that you can then go to your search for your design professionals. We're not ready yet. We want, I want you to learn about them before you go searching for them, and then you can go out and start hunting for the right design professional. 'cause you'll know a lot more when you start to ask the right questions.

And I'm gonna be thinking about you and your project and coming up with ideas and strategies for you to tackle it. So I'll see you on the inside studio and we'll go through a little bit more detail before we dive in. Thanks. .

all right, everybody, I'm back in the studio now and we're gonna continue on discussing this next series and the podcast called The World of Design. The World the design aspect of a project is probably one of the more undervalued. And most important parts of a project, you can see it all over the internet.

And some of those stories are true. Because they hired a poor contractor or whatever. But I'm telling you right now, in 35 years of coordinating the design and construction of projects, if you start off with a poor design, meaning inadequate details, incomplete details, wrong details lack of specifications of materials.

And I'm gonna go through each of those chapters with you so that you can understand what to expect in the upcoming series. My goal here is to educate you to the point where you can control the project. From day one, you can share and set your expectations with your designer so that you can achieve the ultimate goal, your dream home.

So in my book, in fact, I have a copy of it right here. You'll notice that on the title, it's called Orchestrate Your Dream Home, and you can even see a little picture of a conductor on there. The reason I did that, people thought I was a little nuts, but that's what you are, is you have an orchestra of people and companies.

You can be the conductor or you can have somebody else be your conductor. But there's a whole series of musicians in there that from the architects and the interior designers and the consultants and the material suppliers and your contractors and subcontractors, these are all people that have to be coordinated to do.

Just keeping, keep that in mind that my mindset is custom home building, large scale remodels, medium sized remodels, even little remodels. But that's a lot of what I did was tear complete homes down, rebuild them for mostly high tech people that had a high level of attention to detail, which turned me into a little bit of a detail freak.

So just think about it this way, you're the conductor. You may not know how to play the violin, but you sure know when it sounds funny, and that's the idea here. The idea is for you to get to know just enough so you can know when it sounds funny, and then you can ask even more questions or don't hire those people or don't use that product.

So that's the, idea here. So let's move into. What design really is so design. Think about design as a funnel. So you've maybe even for years have been thinking about a project you've actually saved a million pictures of idea books and inspirations on Pinterest and HOUZZ and wherever, hopefully, so that you can convey your expectations to your designer.

And this is gonna tie directly into the quality of the designer that you hire. So the design process is a funnel where all of this information early on, and then as it gets deeper and deeper into the design process, it starts funneling into. Kind of the work product of your architect, your interior designer, residential designer.

Everything is specified here. Please, could you please provide a proposal to build it? That's the goal here. Most people don't do it. Most people rush through the process, get the bare minimum, and then get costs that are all over the place and make uninformed decisions and pick the crappiest contractor 'cause they have the best price, and then pay the price later happens.

I dunno, probably more often than not, and we don't want you to be that. We want you to do it properly. And by the way, it doesn't cost more to do it properly. I'm a firm believer in that if you invest in proper design, professional design. You take the time to do it, you're probably gonna do a project cheaper than your neighbor who hired an architect for half the price and started to pick out the materials during the project.

But you have to understand that if you have to pay $20,000 more to get a, a qualified architect, I guarantee you they're gonna save you money in the long haul. And when you walk and you open up your new front door. You're going to feel, get that feeling because they cared and they dro they provided the details necessary early enough for your builder to do a good job.

The quality of design that your architect outputs is heavily dependent on you and your input from the discovery phase, setting the expectations, letting 'em know who you are, talking about your property. Going through your vision spec ideas, sharing those, and taking a hard look at the budget. If you can do all that in the beginning, before you even call 'em, you've already started the design, you didn't even know it because they're gonna leap forward.

And what that all boils down to is listening. One of the first ways you're gonna be able to gauge a person that you're gonna want to interact with on your project for sometimes years is, are they listening? Are they good listeners? And the only way you're gonna be able to figure that out is how they respond with their commentary and maybe even their deliverables early on, so you can understand if they're really getting it.

And what they can do to tailor their services and the products they recommend to you because of their experience. Coupled with their knowledge. And then tools is another really important one. How well are your architects and designers gonna be able to articulate their ideas to you so that you can understand 'em?

We're gonna get into all that later in the first part of this series, but I just wanted to touch on that. And then the third element of an A, a good architect and a designer. Is how well they shepherded you through the process, through the design process. How comfortable are they making you feel? How well are they responding to your wants and needs and wishes and ideas?

Let me tell you something. They will pick up on things they're seeing their design go into play. Then they'll pick up on things that maybe are not done properly or that could be done better. You can even have them review invoicing and so on. That's a whole nother topic but how well an architect guides you through that.

So that's just a brief summary of what we're gonna be talking about in the very first segment of this series called Understanding Design Professionals. So the primary designers of your project are going to be your architect. A residential designer and an interior designer. Now there's a difference between architect and residential designer.

A good example is a structural engineer or a civil engineer, and we'll talk about that too. I. And there's another like we call the supporting cast, which could be arborist or energy experts or solar contractors, those kind of consultants as well. So there's kinda like this three tier. You've got your main designer that you're gonna be dependent on, that you're gonna be interfacing with the most.

And you're like, wait, whoa, wait a minute. I think I already know what I want, so I'm gonna go with a $5,000 guy. Some plans, I've done projects where plans have cost $300,000, so that's a big one, obviously, but don't just immediately rule out the $35,000 guy because you think it costs too much and they shouldn't be charging that.

That much. What do you know? Do you know? I don't think you probably do know enough to make that determination until you dive into it. The $5,000 guy is a drafts person. He's not an architect. If he's an architect charging $5,000, he won't be around long, much longer. So these are people that aren't designers.

So I can't underscore that enough. So your architect, your design team is a team. And you're part of it. You are in the middle of it. We're working with them to guide them on what you do know. What you do know is you want a new home. What you do know is you want to transform your new home or into a new home to remodel or run a renovation, and that's you're part of the team.

I wouldn't say very many projects or a majority of the projects have actual dedicated interior designers on 'em. It depends on the scale. I'm trying to cover all bases here from, multimillion dollar custom homes to, a hundred thousand dollar renovation. So in some cases, you may not need in a full fledged interior designer, but don't rule it out if you're doing a kitchen design, kitchen, bath, kitchen, and bathroom remodel.

Don't be afraid to hire a certified kitchen and bath designer to help you design the project. Don't expect to just pull something off Pinterest and download a free software application and get to where you want to get. You're gonna, you're gonna be miserable and yeah, maybe you'll spend less money. But did you achieve that goal?

So what we're gonna cover in this series is we're gonna talk about the design team. We're gonna talk about the methods, the agreements. Things like that. We're gonna talk about the design process, a methodical approach. I'll touch on that one more time, and we're gonna talk about how you monitor your budget during the design phase so that you don't get blown away deep into the design process.

A couple other things that we're gonna talk about is some of the details that you need to be aware of in the design process that can undermine. Many things of a project. So keep that in mind. We're gonna touch on that and then how a project is managed during the design process. So architects. So architects, we're gonna talk about the primary design professionals for a minute.

But for the most part, you're building a new custom home or doing a major renovation start. We're gonna start with an architect and teaching you about architects and what they're all about. Remember the architects bring. A lot more to the table than any other designer. When it comes to the big vision, the understanding of architectural styles, the interpretation of those, and translation of those into your style.

So when an architect is conceptualizing a design, they do think in the back of their mind the good ones. Is this even gonna be possible? Is this realistic? Do I have to put a 40 foot steel beam here to make it work? Is that gonna cost a million dollars? They do think about that. It's not necessarily value engineering at that point yet, but it's more about they go off of their knowledge base and their experience.

A lot of architects, when they study, they kind of gravitate towards. They'll either gravitate towards the design side or the math side of the engineering. 'cause structural engineers are fully capable of drawing entire homes. They can design houses, but their tendency is not to do take on projects like that because they're more of a math mind.

So these are, this is legit companies that know what they're doing. And the really good ones have staff where they have their disciplines. And the really evolved ones are focused on design and client relations, and they have staff doing a lot of the drawings and details, and they're a, actually the director of the design, if you will.

A hundred percent in my opinion. But unless they have different departments. So now there's another one called residential designers, and we're going to, we're gonna dig into that too. And what they're good for. They're a drop down from architects. And I'm not gonna get into those details now because I wanna talk about interior designers.

Interior designers are the most undervalued design professional in the universe. And I say that 'cause I come from experience. Most of the interior designers that, or most of the designers that I employed, were interior designers. They had degrees in interior design with a focus on architectural interiors.

In consultation and I was able to build hundreds and hundreds and maybe a thousand projects doing it that way. And it worked out really well. I operated a design build business model. So we're gonna talk about interior designers in the upcoming episode. So the one thing that you, I want you to keep in mind as we go into this world of design is.

One of the problems that you hear everybody complaining about is scope creep. That's a term scope creep. The scope of working really increased. My budget went over and now I'm pissed off because my contractors change ordering me to death. And I hate myself, I hate everybody, and I want to just blow my house up.

Or the designer, they hired an inferior designer and now all of a sudden they want to do this and they want to do that. And they didn't investigate this, and they didn't investigate that. And this was called scope creep, but. The tables get turned too often towards everybody else, but the homeowner and you, we, you, as the homeowner, do have to take on some responsibility.

But here's the problem. You don't know. You don't know. Like you need to do that, and that's my job is to help you get to know that and why you can control the screwed up situations that could happen. Early on. So scope creep is a crazy one and it's usually because it didn't get specified like it was supposed to.

And how it's followed up on is paramount to getting what needs to get on the design in the specifications. And we're gonna dig into that. I. Budget mismanagement. Excuse me. Budget mismanagement has to be the biggest, right? So you've set a budget six months ago when we were going through that fund discovery phase, and now you're deep into the design having a blast.

And oh my God, I love this. This is awesome. This is great. Has anybody asked how much it's gonna cost? Has anybody even brought it up? Nobody brings it up. I'll tell you that right now. Unless it's you who brings it up and you and I would recommend you do, and we're gonna talk about what I call budget checkpoints during the design.

And there's been many of those times where people just said, you know what? I love it so much I'm doing it. But there's been times where people got upset or disappointed that after all of that effort. It's just way more than I wanted to spend, and so we didn't run a perfect practice. I'll be totally honest.

We didn't do it intentionally. We just got excited and we had to back. Fortunately, we were able to backtrack and then parse the project out and phase it out or scale things down. But you can see what happened there is it created a lot more work for everybody. And now the customer feels like they are you, the homeowner are feeling like you're, now you're making compromises because they really wanted that.

I won't get into some of the other things that we're gonna talk about, such as the consultants, 'cause we're gonna get into that into a level of details. So I just, all I wanna do now is talk about before we we exit out of this. This series or this introduction is what really is coming up in this series.

Exactly. So that, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna, we're gonna talk about understanding design professionals as the next episode. Then we're gonna talk about and that we're gonna focus on that episode. We're gonna focus on architectural and residential designers. Then we're gonna, the next episode we're gonna talk about interior designers, why they're so important, and what do they do.

So those are the kind of things that we're gonna talk about now, a big one after. After you get your head around the design, the designers, the people, and the consultants, we're gonna dig into the design process, which is a specific methodology that. A lot of, maybe even most architectural firms and architects take when they do a project and there's a, it's a stepping stone approach.

I'm gonna talk with you about each of those steps, why they're there, what they accomplish, and how you can participate in 'em to maintain control of your project. The other one, we're gonna, so now that you have a sense of the design professionals, you have an understanding of the process, then we're gonna talk about.

It's just, it's a customizing thing here which is best for you. So that's the idea there. The fun one is next, which is called design limitations. Before you even start your design, you probably have a lot of restrictions that you didn't even know about. Most of them come from your local city, state, and county regulations.

I want to expand all the way to my back fence, or I want to expand within 10 feet of my back fence so I can get a big master suite and whatever. You may not be able to do that, and if you know a little bit about that, you can make sure that you can stay in control because. It's a design professional's job to know it all.

But here's the problem, they don't know it all. And when you go from city to city and then rules change every year it's a full-time job. And that's why a lot of architectural firms have people on staff that are just compliance that try to make sure when a client comes in the door and they share what they want, the first thing they do is they are online, they are in the planner.

I'm gonna educate you on. The basics of how plans are developed, how they're organized, and what's on them. And we will probably move into more audio and YouTube presentation there because I wanna show you some of the things that you'll be able to visualize and, it's, it that can only do so much with podcasting and YouTubing.

I wanted some kind of framework to go off of, to elaborate on and tell you what, just get right down into it. But reading the book is something you can have by your side all the time, but approvals and permits, so gaining approvals of your project. And that just doesn't mean from your city, but it also could mean from your HOA the state, the county, the city, the process that you have to go through.

And this is a big part of your professional designer's responsibility. Now, if you're gonna try to take that on yourself. You better listen up on that series because there's a lot of places where you can get hung up big time and blow your project up if you are not in tune with the process. So keep in mind that an architect's one of their key responsibilities.

So in conclusion, the. The world of design is going to go through the interpersonal aspects of design with the people that you need. It's gonna get into the technical aspects such as the plans, and it's going to help you stay in control, to gain control, to ask the right questions, to position you, to meet your expectations.

The basis of what we're gonna be talking about and we'll move from there. So again, this is Bill Reed with the Awakened Homeowner. I can see more and more people are listening every day and I love it. And if you have any questions specific that I can address in the podcast, I really want to do that.

So if right now I think the only way you're gonna be able to do that is to email me directly. At WW Reed, REID, at the awaken homeowner.com, I do have a Facebook page the Awaken Homeowner Facebook page that you could join and you can ask questions there. This is, I, the private community isn't a hundred percent set up yet.

I want real life and professionals too, architects, contractors, homeowners that want to test it out for me and tell me what's great and what's not, and what they wish they had. And I'm really excited about that. So if you're really into it, join there and check it out. Otherwise, I will see you on the next episode, over and out.

Thanks.