HOME DESIGNER CHRONICLES FROM THE GRANITE KNEE – V

 recent, college graduate asked how AG and The Missus could guide her in developing her professional passion for [residential] design.  Herewith, in reply . . . . .

 Dear D.,

Focus on your design passion, and learn all you can, most preferably by doing it - including those aspects that folks around you regard as beneath them, or undesirable.  The closer you can get to living the roots of your craft, the better.  Make up the chapters of your professional life experience with diligence, discipline, humility, honesty, and a sense of well-being.  Know what you like, and appreciate all of it – the likes and the dislikes.

Associate only with the best - better than you at whatever it is – the greater the disparity, the more valuable the association.

Select mentors carefully and be absolutely open with them.

Listen. Shut up and listen. 

Observe.  Don't watch.  Observe.

Be curious, skeptical, from Missouri.

Remember being taught “Walk before you run”?  You’re crawling.  Learning is discovering.  Discovering unfolds, takes aging.

Speak and write the truth.  Or don't speak and write.

In your field, continually consider why things are as they are; what was on the other guy's mind when he did what he did; did he get where he was going; what's the story; what's the message.

Make no enemies before their time, but know them for whom they are.  Eschew your enemies; pay attention to what you're doing.  Some of the most disagreeable first contacts can grow into meaningful, purposeful relationships; some of the warmest introductions and newest best friends can turn to bitter dust.

Don't beg, bemoan, victimize, slavishly or selfishly grasp, act in desperation, exceed negatively, disparage or otherwise give up on your work.  The merit of your lifetime is on you.

Look forward, not backward.  Ask of yourself how whatever it is you're up to makes you better at what you do.

Be acutely, currently aware of the technologies of your work, and experience the best and newest of them.  Know your tools. Use good tools.  You'll encounter times in your profession where there are real, physical limits to your days and the strength in your sinews, and the only way to achieve more or achieve it better is to be more productive.  Technology is a tireless engine of individual productivity.

Backup your computer files frequently and make technological redundancy your everyday friend.  Seamless technology is not upon us.  Tireless, yes.  Seamless, no.

When you're ready, teach  your craft to others.  This is best done personally.  This is most often done with clients.   You don't need a podium or tenure to perform; if you get really good at what you do at this or that, folks who give a damn will seek you out.  Teach with both honor and humility.  And answer each question you're asked.  You'll be continually surprised at how much you don't know about what you know when keenly inquiring minds start inquiring.

Take courageous, considered risks; do not take brave, foolish risks. You will be known for your successes and your failures.  Failing at courageous, considered risks is OK.  Failing at brave, foolish risks is not OK.

Scrupulously respect your clients.  This is not a herald to kiss butt.  This is to get you pointed in their direction, to pay attention  to what you're doing by first paying attention to what they're doing.

Constantly define and be keenly aware of your market and competition, your market platform and market positioning.

Be prepared to be lucky and to be unlucky.  We sometimes refer to this precept as knowing which train to board.  In this metaphor, lucky trains don't stop at one's station often in a lifetime, unlucky ones do.  Don’t stand there waiting; keep moving.  Think about this all the time.

Best to all,

AG and The Missus

· · · · · · ·

For good plans, you pay now.  For bad plans, you may pay now and you pay later.

· · · · · · ·

Residential design spurns and eschews instant gratification.

 · · · · · · ·

The truth?  Their house plans, their house.  Your house plans, your house.

So how much do you really know about designing and drafting your own house plans?

· · · · · · ·

Next time you're looking to hire house builders, ask 'em whether the house they're going to build for you will be with the same or better quality materials and methods as they'd use for own house . . . and watch 'em wiggle.

· · · · · · ·

Do you think that the devil's in the details?   The only devil in the details of whom we know is the devil serving lazy, lousy home designers and builders.  From our vantage, details take the wiggle-room out of commonly low designing and building standards.

· · · · · · ·

Nobody right around here has impressed me with knowing it all, including the man in the mirror. Learning is good.

· · · · · · ·

Whatever you know about designing a house isn't likely much.  Really.  Whatever you know about building a house isn't likely much, either.  For sure.   So where you are is in-between folks who know way more than you do about the house you're paying out the nose to get designed and built, live in for maybe a major chunk of your time on this earth, sell someday to cash-in.  You know more about groceries than about house design and house construction.  That can change, but only if it's in you to get from here to there.

The AG thinks of buyers of to-be-builts as being in a wide-open area between forces so beyond control, like floating with the deep river's current just this side of the waterfall and rapids.  Blissful ignorance.  No clue.   

· · · · · · ·

The AG asks, "How much house design and building experience do you have?"  The AG hears, "Well, I built our deck from scratch, and we up-dated our master bathroom with tile and new knobs.  So, I have some experience."  The AG thinks, "You have diddly experience."  The AG asks, "What were the calculated loads on your deck beams?  And please tell me how you formed up the kitchen tile substrates relative to both moisture intrusion and bending moment?"  And the AG hears, "Huh?"

· · · · · · ·

What you don't know will hurt you.  For years.   In residential design and construction, that's absolutely true.  Your ignorance will hurt you in quality of design and construction - in safety, durability, convenience.  You'll work with pros who know that you don't know diddly; you don't even know not to pay out the nose for whatever it is the contractors decide to build for you.  There you stand before them - ready, willing able and dumb as dirt about the house they're going to build for you.  They can tell you're ripe for the picking from the moment they first see your plans, hear your first question, hear your first answer to theirs, walk for the very first time onto the worksite.  Your ignorance glows, it all but precedes you.

· · · · · · ·

Our work at Before The Architect is most useful to and appreciated by those who have been-there, done-that with some architects and builders, and prefer not to go back there and get it done to them again.

· · · · · · ·

They say that the devil's in the details.  Hell's bells, that's all there is to a good house plan set well done.  I think folks find that devil in there by peering through their fog of ignorance and seeing their own vacuous, vapid stare looking right back at 'em - like the train light down a dark tunnel.

· · · · · · ·

As written to a couple of our beloved clients:

 So here’s what we’ve got for arm’s length viewing [in elevations] – 

·        We have a 32’ high ridge on a house (not counting two towering chimney caps) next to a 16’ high breezeway standing 33” back at its front face from the house front face next to a garage which, if fully two stories and, on the same grade level as the house and breezeway, stands 25’ back from the house, is 9’ narrower than the house as measured along the house long-axis, 29’ tall at its ridge.  (Data are approximate.)  All this is on a 2-dimensional, same-plane basis; it is as though we made cardboard cutouts of house, Breezeway, and Garage, and pasted them up on a warehouse wall. 

·        We can be sure would that any one of us looks at our three structures, that the farther back from the house front of face we go then (no matter the physical mass) the smaller the farther-back elements appear relative to the house itself; however, given the sorry state of Autocad and graphic technologies, we’ll have to pretend it’s so when we’re judging the depth relationships of and between the pieces.

·        In our elevations, our viewpoint is not quite a hundred feet in front of the house at round-about 15’ or so over grade, looking out from one flat-screen eyeball not greater than 7 millimeters high and nigh unto 150’ wide.  In other words, our three Front Of House elements could be rightly arranged in-line on the horizontal and vertical next to each other cheek by jowl or in different counties and there’d be no telling.  The AG bets that even George Eastman couldn’t have envisioned our Kodak moment.

That’s as good as pretty pictures are going to gets in our corner of Cyberville.  Hoo-rah.

· · · · · · ·

There's  always a way to cheap-down otherwise high-quality design and construction.   The best way we've seen is to stick to building code standards as a goal worth achieving.

· · · · · · ·

 Looking for minimums?   Building codes are where you'll find 'em. 

· · · · · · ·

No house plan is perfect; our house plans are just better than the rest.

· · · · · · ·

You might think of us as clothing tailors at the very best stores - we custom fit your house to you, attending to your needs and interests while knowing more about a good suit well made than most anybody else.

· · · · · · ·

There are things you learn in going-on 4 decades of house design and house construction.  Skepticism.  Job-site reality.  The overwhelming importance and influence of superior knowledge and experience.  The vital values in unhurried consideration of a house plan.  Recognition that you'll never know it all.  Clients don't know how to communicate needs and wants clearly; clients itch where they can't scratch.

· · · · · · ·

With the other guys, you can get the house they sold you.  With us, you can get the house you know you paid for.

· · · · · · ·

 Among the 19 Deadly Sins, these are two-fers right from the get-go: real estate brokers, speculative real estate developers, bigtime building contractors, building tradesmen, real estate lawyers - all are categorically banned from our services.  You see, we have a conflict of interest with respect to this pack of professionals: we're interested in getting paid.

· · · · · · ·

The AG's been asked about the libretto to The Dolorous Dirge of the Dastardly Deadbeat.  Well, sir, there are volumes of versions of this malcontent miscreant's moanings.  I'll let you in on one opening stanza - in a house plans draft embodying a multitude of positive achievements, the vituperative villain will dwell only on things self-defined as suspect.  Another - denial, particularly denial of transgressing any of the 19 Deadly Sins.

· · · · · · ·

Oscar Wilde had it that "a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  Oscar, we're not just talking cynics here.  We're talking client rejects, too.

· · · · · · ·

The worst home designers of house plan interiors layouts are most usually men.  It's a hard lesson well learned. Took me years to know for sure what I don't.  And what she does.

· · · · · · ·

This was to clients who were initially our newest best friends from Rhode Island for whom we reviewed their own rough plans and replied in three pages noting problems with both design and building code.  The plans were deeply flawed.  They clients became unpleasant and were granted leave.  Read for yourself this tale of treachery.  Dear Peter and Ruth, Another lucky day, isn’t it? Of course you’re free to stiff us.  Rationalization is not necessary, you know, in a darkish sense unseemly [they knew full well what they were doing from the first moment and needn't pretend].  Feel good about it, you should: you’ve at least two other home designers [by their own admission] left to screw over.  Busy, busy for you.  Sympathies to the others.

A purpose to one's life, perhaps the principal purpose to one's life, is in developing discernment between good and evil; and, therefrom, decide that which improves or weakens one's self and community, to know the differences of good and evil by their seeds and fruits, to make a determination by thought, word, and deed which to embrace and which to eschew. Our association is acknowledged with regrets, it's dissolution with relief.  Yes, please, do go away. Stay away. AG [Our failure here is in that their one Deadly Sin from the start was a multiple count of Sin 2, a condition for which, lacking a second, other Sin, left the door open for the practiced impenitent, until this experience moved us to change the rules; namely, two occasions of the same Deadly Sin equal 1 occasion of 2 different Deadly Sins.] 

· · · · · · ·

Life's good when, usually midway or later in a draw, when a client suddenly says or writes, "Finally, I see it all coming together for the first time" or "It's the house I've always wanted" or "Thank you for making our dream closer to our reality."

· · · · · · ·

Been around long enough, done enough, to get it wrong lots of times.  Can't say everything got wrong at least once, because surprises keep popping up.  Can say that most everything that went wrong got right.  This can accurately be referred to as the practice of house design.

· · · · · · ·

 When our custom house plans roll out on the table, good builders praise, bad builders panic.

· · · · · · ·

How bad is it out there on the job sites across the fruited plain?  Glad you asked.  It is this bad.  Last year, a client put our house plans to construction bid - about 20,000 square feet, 3 levels, 3 kitchens and a kitchenette, lotsa beds and baths, etc., etc., etc. - to a few high-end general contractors in a major metropolitan area.  One construction bidder begged our client to reduce all fractional measurements to 1/2 linear inch, because his undocumented aliens had real trouble working with any other fractions.  That's how bad it is out there.

· · · · · · ·

California?  Gotta be the air.  Or water.  A state? Yes.  A state of mind?  Yep.   So many people?  Yes.  So whacked out?  You betcha.  True stories - "Do you do pyramids?"  "I envision a Hawaiian village with 7 interconnected huts on posts over water with plants and fish right here in the Napa Valley."  "This house has to have a bedroom on the main floor for my sick father and the bedroom will have to double as our Dining Room until he's dead.  Who knows how long that will take?  And the bedroom has to have a bathroom directly off it and without a door."  "I did say Modern, but I meant Traditional.  I did say to remodel the existing house, too, but I didn't mean it.  I did say to give us space really away from the kids, but don't make it obvious.  OK?"  "Yes, we want a house just like the one down the [rural] road, but maybe just a little different.  It cannot be very attractive to look at.  We must fit into the neighborhood, you know?" “Can’t use open web, metal-plate connected floor trusses in this county.  No one knows what to do with them.” “So I gave you the wrong measurements a few times.  So what?  Give me a good design and I’ll make it fit.”  "Dude, forget the kitchen.  Neither of us cooks past microwaving.  We eat out a lot."  "Yes, you’re design respects everything I wanted.  Everything.  But that's not actually what I wanted.  Real home designers wouldn't do that."  "What do you mean, building code?"  "I can do this.  I have a shovel.  I can rent the rest." 

· · · · · · ·

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Designer Chronicles I ] [ Designer Chronicles II ] [ Designer Chronicles III ] [ Designer Chronicles IV ] [ Designer Chronicles V ] [ Designer Chronicles VI ]

 About Us ◊ jrp2h2000@yahoo.com ◊ 770-889-6964 ◊ Site Map