Designing Your Dream Home

I think if you were to ask anybody if they would like to design their own “Dream Home” some day, they would probably say yes.

I know I would.

How many times have you walked into someone else’s house and seen the  kitchen, or the layout of the rooms, or how big the garage is, or even a trap-door that goes behind a bookshelf that leads to the kid’s playroom, and thought how clever those designs were, and how you would love to do something similar? I know that most of the ideas I have and want to implement in my future “Dream Home” I have borrowed from someone else. How cool it would be to be able to design that house on my own and put all my ideas into it.

There is a problem, though. I don’t know how. I suppose I could get a paper and pencil to write down the things I’ve seen, or my own ideas, and maybe even try to sketch out my own designs. But that’s about all I could do. And that’s exactly what people do.

My family lives in Alaska on a mountain side. It’s pretty remote, and very beautiful, so there are a lot of people who end up going up there to build their own homes. The few that I have talked to seem to express the same frustration in the home building process which is making the designs. To get your design ideas across to an architect, you have to draw on pieces of paper and meet up with that architect frequently until finally the architect has created for you a digital replication of what he or she has deciphered from your doodles and your explanations. And even then, a lot of things are wrong or different than what you imagined.

Another observation I have made is that a lot of the people that I know who finally get to design and build their dream home are parents who are in their late 40′s, 50′s, or higher. The kids are older and most are gone out of the house. The dream home is finally done, but there is no more family to enjoy it with, besides visits during the summer or Christmas. I suppose that people find they have more TIME and MONEY to be able to finally build their dream home at that age. What career father and children-raising mother has time to draw out designs and meet up with an architects to design their dream home and then build it amongst everything else they have to do! Probably not many.

I feel like the whole process takes too long and gets to be too expensive. I’m 26 years old and would love to be able to start this process soon and have time to enjoy our dream home with my kids as they grow up.

Has anyone else felt this same way before? Has anyone else wanted to build their dream home some day, but just have no idea how? Or lack the money or the time? Maybe the more important question is: For those that have designed and built their own homes, was the process of designing and building your home a painful one? Maybe too expensive? Really exhausting?

I would love to hear some feedback from those that have either thought about this before, or those who have gone through this process before. Feel free to leave comments!