The Project Planning Workshop

Imagine your dream home - customized for your lifestyle – completed on time and on budget, without the headaches. When you are designing a custom home, every detail matters.
As a professional architect, I care about the integrity of the design and want to guide you through the process.

“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe” ~Abraham Lincoln

The #1 Project Problem – Projects being handled by the wrong person, not properly planned and designed and going over time and over budget.

On a daily basis, we see people moving projects into designing before the research or the careful attention to one’s unique Needs and Options has even started or has been adequately defined. This is like a doctor starting to prescribe medicine without a thorough diagnosis or in our case of designing and building; we jump ahead at design or worst, to some, jumping to construction from sketches without properly looking at the most essential questions that's needed to be answered for an architect to prescribe solutions.

That is why I created the Project Planning Workshop. Now you have a simple process to help you move the Project Planning or Needs and Options Review Phase.

If you follow this tool, you will reduce project risk and improve project’s design success and do it fast. Once you have understood or have done your homework on all the key ideas below and is confident enough after that, you are ready to move to the Design Phase.

1. Building Project Roadmap
Review the roadmap and identify where you are in your journey and recognize where you are going.

2. Frequently Aked Questions & Should Ask Questions
Questions you need to know about working with an architect and going about your project.

3. Myths and Reality
Some things architects do above and beyond sketches to complete a project.

4. How to Create a Design Brief
Contact your shortlisted architects to start your design process

          5. Budgetary Estimation and Finding the right architect for you.

          Contact your personal architect to work on estimating a reasonable budget estimate. 

6. Readiness Meter
Gauge how ready you are to move to the Design Phase.

Five most essential things to know before deciding to design and build

You may or may not have the funds, time and an idea yet of what to build at this moment, now the question is "are you knowledgeable enough" and "patient enough" to take some time to do your homework or research into looking at the big picture of your dream and to take the first essential steps in order for your desires to start materializing? If you are willing to learn and become patient enough in realizing a huge undertaking and very expensive project such as your dream house then this article is for you.

Planning, designing, constructing, and managing projects is no easy tasks. A person becomes an architect by studying and training to become proficient with this expertise for at least seven (7) years and engineers take at least five (5) years with their respective professions, which is all you need to properly plan and design a successful project. The value that you get from professionals will pay off from the start of your project up to the useful life of your building. Of course, you can design it yourself and hire draftsman, then hire an experienced construction person but you'll get nowhere near the quality of what a team of professionals can achieve for your project. In every project you will need the combined expertise of at least four (4) professionals, foremost is your architect to coordinate with his/her overall vision of form and space the building's basic structure done by structural engineers, electrical by electrical engineers and plumbing by plumbing engineers. Other professionals are needed in more complex buildings beside a modest residential building.