Often, we think about adding a room, expanding our kitchen, or reconfiguring the spaces in our home by removing a few walls here and there. We may call a contractor and go ahead. However, what we get will most likely be less than what we could have had. Besides having spent more time on the details, we should have spent more time considering the whole picture!
Way back when I was a student, I remember being called to a potential client’s house and asked if I could design them a third bedroom upstairs. I was thrilled to have a real life job! So I measured up the house and took the info home with me and drew a plan of the existing house. After studying the plan, I realized this was a more difficult problem than I had thought. You don’t simply glue on a bedroom! Among other things (like zoning and building codes), there’s access and structure to consider. And in this case, building on top of that part of the house which, in itself, was “iffy” was even more “iffy”!I was stuck and worried that I had taken on more than I could handle.
Slowly, it began to dawn on me that if I reconfigured the existing spaces in a more efficient manner and added a simple extension of the living room and therefore not having to deal with the “iffy” structure of the house, I could get a third bedroom plus a much more gracious living room! And, it would be a lot less costly.
What I had done was look beyond the boundaries of the particular “problem” and at a much larger picture. In essence, I had stumbled onto the value of holistic thinking in relationship to a project. In the parlance of designers, it’s called master planning.
If you’re finding your home now is inadequate, whether aesthetically or functionally, you generally will be better off not to simply attack the immediate problem but to think in terms of long-range plans and goals. Then you can design your home to be what you really want it to be, even if you can’t do the all work right now. The advantages are numerous. For example, you can:
1. design in such a way that you can phase the work as your budget and needs
allow;
2. insure that what you do today won’t negatively impact what you’ll be needing
or wanting in the future;
3. price the project at an early stage, in parts and in whole, to help you make those
money-related decisions;
4. decide from these plans whether your current house will actually meet your
goals or whether you should realistically think about moving; and
5. understand better how all the spaces will interrelate.
So, when you’re thinking about building or remodeling, think big! You can always pare it down later.
(For more information, see our website: https://ctabuilds.com/range_of_services.html)
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