Notes on Building Well
Think ahead
Building a house or an addition is an important event in your life, and you can seldom keep repeating it over and over until you get it right. It can be a wonderful experience, a nightmare or something in between. Like the rest of your life, things can happen that are unexpected or out of your control and you have to learn to cope as you go along. But most of the process can be anticipated and planned, and the better the planning, the less that will be left to chance.
Work with others
The building of you house is a collaboration between many different people. In a well built house the sum of the individual efforts will be far greater than what any one person can do alone. You must always balance your desire to participate in the process with the fact that you can find someone else to the same job better and faster. Remember that when your house is done, the plumber, carpenter and architect will just move on to the next project, leaving you and your family in the house. It ultimately is your home, not theirs, for better or worse.
Be demanding
Wanting the most beautiful house in the world is very reasonable, but to achieve that you have to hire people with the talent, skill and passion to make that happen. You have to work within the constraints of real world budget, time and functional requirements, but just because a project is modest in size does not mean that beauty and imagination must be left out. Ask people for their best work, not their cheapest. If you hire the cheapest architect, the cheapest carpenter, the cheapest painter, and so on, you will get the cheapest work everyone can produce, not their best, often at a greater financial cost.