If you are contemplating building a new home or even dream of building a new home in the future, this course will give you the satisfaction of building the home that you designed, tailor made to your and your family's needs and budget. For a high end custom home, you will need to hire an architect. This, the first of a two part course, will save you several thousand dollars of architectural fees by preparing the design program and budget yourself and it will insure that your wants and needs are the basis for your home's design. A follow on course will provide a crash course in design software and teach you how to convert your part I space program into schematic floor plans and prepare exterior massing alternatives.

In this, Part I, I will teach you :

• A little known secret that we architects use stimulate our creative thinking.

• How to identify and assess the impacts that regulatory actions will have on your design. These impacts include building codes, zoning ordinances and neighborhood covenants.

• How to make decisions regarding rooms and room sizes and prepare a spread sheet listing of the needed rooms by function and size. I will provide you a guide listing of room size options and an Excel template to use in creating your list.

• To identify the various costs associate with construction and those cost elements on which you have the most control.

• To identify the various levels of quality of construction and how your choices in materials can effect both cost and quality of construction.

• To evaluate and make room by room decisions regarding  level of finishes and associated costs. I will provide an Excel template to assist you in this task.

• To balance quality levels and room sizes in order to arrive at an acceptable construction  price point. This is a "war gaming" exercise that lets you and your spouse or partner make final decisions on rooms that will be built, the quality of finishes in each room and the size and cost of the home that will be built.

• How to arrive at final space program and construction budget that you can provide your architect or use in Part II of this course.