For those of you that had your home built, or if your an architect I have some questions...?

Question

Okay well we first met our architect on August 14th. He's going to build a house for me and my hubby in the backyard of where we live right now with my in-laws. It is going to be a 1200sq ft house, one story with 3 rooms, 2 full baths. That day that we met him we gave him a check for $1600, a week later he showed us the interior design. A week later he showed us the exterior design. After we approved of it, we gave him the other check.

He said that the next step is engineering which will take almost 2 weeks, and then after that we will give him the last check, and we will start to build the house. We are not having the architects contractors do it, we are all going to do it on our own, since everyone in our family knows something different about building a home.

My questions are, what exactly will the architect do in the engineering? Whats that process about? If by the end of September we are all ready to go, do you think that we can finish it by December? If every weekend we work on it? Is it possible for it to be done that quick?

Answer 1

The architect will determine what materials are needed to actually build the house.  He will calculate live and dead loads for the floors and roof, and specify the dimensional lumber/metal beams/laminated beams required for each span.  You can then take that plan to the lumber yard and they will do a "take-off", where they determine how much material you need for each phase.  While 1200 sq. ft. is not a huge house. it will still take time to build.  If you only work on the house on weekends, you may have the house enclosed, roofed, and sided in 3 months but I doubt highly that it will be done.  It depends on how many people you have working on it, and their skill level.  I would figure at least 4-5 months working part time.  Hope this helps.

Answer 2

My husband and I designed our own house and drew up our own plans.  We hired a contractor who used those plans to build our house.  The plans were drawn up on a piece of paper from a sketching pad.  Our contractor hired sub contractors for all the work, which we approved prior to any work being done.

As far as the architect being involved with the engineering, he basically will make sure that his and your ideas will actually work.  An engineer will review the plans, and see if the house will be structurally sound and support itself.  If not then the architect will have to alter your plans.  This will have to be approved by you, then the engineers before work can begin.

With our plans, the outside design of our house drastically changed because of our roof line.  Our design required a completely different roof than we had planned, but we like it.

Don't expect to be in you house in anything less than 6 months.  Our contractor promised we would be in our house in 3 months --- ha! ha! ha!  After almost 6 months, we started moving in while the painters were still working.

Best wishes and congratulations on you new home.

Answer 3

Don't forget City approvals for permiting.  Also you have to schedule inspections from the City as well.  You're not allowed to cover up any work until you receive a sign off from the inspector, otherwise, they have the right to make you tear down the work to reveal what he needs to inspect.  

Since you're building the home yourself, understand that you will have no legal recourse should something go wrong with the construction.

Anyway, to answer your question, the architect makes sure the structural components are not in conflict with the design any other system in the house.  For instance, he needs to make sure a structural beam is called out too low in the drawings, etc.  As far as the schedule goes, it all depends, as I mentioned before, you have the inspectors to contend with.  Framing a 1200 sf house can be done in a couple of days, but the interior finishes takes substantially more time.  Wood floor takes a lot longer to install than carpet,