The design contract...where ideas become detailed plans

In a number of roles I have had in my consulting years I have found that keeping all elements of a project separated by contractual boundaries does not lead to the best outcome. Thus, right at the onset of the project we made it known that we wanted to be an integral player in the design phase and that we wanted the builder too in that mix. Fortunately eHaus and QBuild already had a workflow that had several interactive stages so that was readily accepted.

Our kick -off meeting with Jon Iliffe, principal of eHaus, went well and we negotiated a timeline that was quite "sharp" in its delivery of key milestones. They inferred that to achieve the timeline would be somewhat challenging for all concerned, especially us, as it required a lot of key decisions in short time frames. At that stage I don't think they knew who they were dealing with ! They were also keen for us to engage an architect rather than an architectural designer, but we had already considered that quite carefully and knew that we did not want to have something that incorporated "flashy ideas" at greater cost.

A key lesson for anyone designing a new home from scratch is to have quite a strong concept of what they want delivered, especially how it fits with one's values and long term desires. In our case we wanted a home that was easy to care for, was built with long lasting materials, that fitted into the local environment and was suitable for us to live in, hopefully, for many years to come. Having had a 3 storey property to look after for 17 years there were definite things like surface accessibility to clean that were in the forefront of our thinking.

We wrote our values, needs and key constraints down and had them available for the first site meeting of all 3 parties. This took place on a beautiful Autumn morning and everyone was very enthusiastic about the site's potential. This visit raised a few matters regarding where key elements might be located, eg the buried water tanks one has to have at Kapiti, so that was added to our growing list of queries.  We found in this stage that one needed to keep an Issues Log so that one could track what was being addressed and by whom.

After this kick off meeting we started to deliberately go out 2 or 3 times a week to look at specific items of the design that would help us make decisions. Some of these were easy to progress, some were very difficult.  For most aspects of a building we found that once you have a plan to send a vendor/supplier they will be prepared to give you a free quote. We'll cover our experiences of this in subsequent blogs.  Its a good idea to set up box files on each topic and an Excel workbook with all the various areas in as there is a huge amount of information to progress and track.

So ...slowly the design progresses and you eagerly await the first concept plan...