BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – BACKGROUND
HOME DESIGNER CHRONICLES FROM THE GRANITE KNEE – VI
FUNNY & FAMOUS QUOTES, FAMOUS QUOTES ABOUT LIFE AND HOME PLANS
And more ducks in a row . . .
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NOTE THAT YOU MAY FREELY QUOTE THE AUTOCAD GRANDDAD ABOUT HOME PLANS WITH PROPER ATTRIBUTION.
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Ok. Ok. Sure, this is tooting-your-own-horn. So be it said. So be it done.
Five months, nigh unto 400 hours, 16 sheets, big home. First Architectural Board review - just 3 suggestions. Suggestions, mind you. Softballs, all three. He asked, "Ever before?" Answer, "Not that I know of." Second Architectural Board review - nothing to say. He asked, "Ever before?" Answer, "Not that I know of." Building permit application process - 1 week, no comment. He asked, "Ever before?" Answer, "Not that I know of. Not that fast. Not that little."
AG loves to tell this story.
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A home inspector comes to the home of a past client for whom Before The Architect designed, among others, a large deck all along the back of the home. The inspection is for clearing a sales contract. He was supposed to enter the home for interior inspection once he'd done with the exterior. Thirty minutes passed and our client couldn't find the guy anywhere, that is, until he looked under the deck. There was the inspector taking picture after picture of footings, connectors, knee braces, posts, bolts, flashing, washers, post fortifiers, beams . . . the works. The inspector notices our client, apologizes for not coming in sooner. Says that he couldn't help himself. Says he only reads about a deck structure like this - the way it should be done and never is. Almost. The pics are going back to the office to show his co-workers how it's done right and then straight into his classroom teachings on home inspection and home structure. Home run.
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It is a rare but not inexperienced event when clients begin to get an in-tandem case of the cheaps and the hurries. Conserve cash and keep moving. Best for AG and The Missus to move on, too. Sins #2 and #11 by AG's reckoning. #11's been brushed up against once before in this enterprise; #2 is a first, far as he can recall. Terminal. Understandable. Signs of the times.
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If all goes the way you hope, want, and expect, then it'll work out swell. Underprepared is always an option and, to an extent, a given philosophically and pragmatically. There's no 'just add water' way to convey what's not known about what's not known and why its pursuit is worthy; time at the granite knee of life experience is perilously, painfully personal. You have to be there.
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The ill-considered, the unconsidered, the uncontemplated is
the null set of custom home design and home building. Underprepared is always an
option, a path to be taken, especially when clients begin to come down with the
cheaps and the hurries.
When is it overprepared? When the collective of home designers/home builders since the
‘60s and clients run out of stuff to worry about, while holding a full bag of
experience – vicarious and real – strategies, and tactics to deal with what they
didn’t know that they didn’t know.
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Know your home plans. Hold tight to the e-book. It's not important that you can do what a capable home designer or home builder can do. It is important that you can think like a capable home designer or home builder. Vicarious. Details. Nonlinear. Vicarious. Details. Nonlinear. Ask yourself or someone else and listen hard to the answer. Always on simmer. Otherwise, you won't get where you might have thought you were going and you won't appreciate the difference. The contractor, sub, or supplier can tell, right up front, that you're another moron and can take you to wherever, whenever, however, for whatever. That telling moment is almost always the very first impression. Word spreads fast. You're either a welcome mat or someone with whom to reckon and be respected. Gaw-ron-teed.
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Home plans made easy? Home designing made easy? Home building made easy? All that's easy here is to screw it up. AG 2009
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This home designer prefers the descriptive “mature" over “old". We’re talking a state of grace, a status and role, an achievement, a sector in the circle of life, and not a social, generational, or pejorative pigeonhole.
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Note well that none of these elements in any expressed option is beyond the weekend warrior. All these changes are not only relatively inexpensive to do, but also almost all of them do not alter the existing, main structure. In other words, good home design does not have to mean great gobs of demolition; to ice a cake is home design, too.
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Dear Boy, To do the heavy lifting, you must get up on your hind legs, bethey physical legs of bone and muscles or metaphorical legs of knowledge and commitment.
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Dear Girl, To get the cheaps and hurries and, thereafter, blame the home designer, is a criminal fraud of intellect, a rock hard dishonesty. This should get you, in this home designer's view, a permanent posting backed to the wall in the halls of Hell.
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Power's corruption isn't a perverse pervasion particularly of national government, be it borne there as with all others of monopoly interest and ignorant disinterest. The caldron's of corruption simmer in guilds and authorities having jurisdiction right on down to your own backyard.
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There are times when AG and The Missus see a home design failure - inside, outside, some small point, some big 'uns - and there no telling what possibly might have gone on to have made it so. The course of human life – individually and collectively - is curbed by its own excesses, to which excesses some are impelled and others propelled: the Icarus syndrome; the insufficiently attentive to what had better be done to persist if not prevail and prosper; under-prepared; the aberrant and the perverse.
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Standards of home design and home building are not about the perfectibility of people; they are about the perfectibility of goals.
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Based only on this old home builder and home designer's experience down all the years, with rarest exception, I can reckon just one condition worse than governance and that is more of it.
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Power's corruption isn't a perverse pervasion peculiar to national government, be it borne there as with all others of monopoly interest and ignorant disinterest. Caldron's of corruption simmer in cabals of the complicit and the culpable, guilds, authorities, and associations claiming jurisdiction right on down to your own backyard. Lacking the Framer’s dynamic tension of governance, balances of power fail not only between branches of authority but also between the governing and the governed.
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"Have you incorporated 'Green' design points in any of your designs?" asked a client prospect.
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Depends . . . I know the term ‘green’ can be used variously
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Looking out from underneath my rock . . .
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Comment: All this is not to say that AG and The Missus are not inquired upon by clients on aspects relative to both materials and methods of all sorts. They are. And they reply. She-who’s refreshing about the essence and essentials broadly and, especially, design materials and their associations. AG’s . . . well, you know by now.
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If you’re informed and diligent about your home design and construction, you may get what you pay for and know that it’s so. If not, not, and the more’s the pity. It takes a while – sometimes a long while, sometimes forever and a breath – without figuring that there’s better and worse in home design and construction, that you’ve known only the worse of them, and better’s worth what it takes to get from here to there.
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All footings are not created equal.
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