Home sweet home Part 1 of 4

In the summer of 2011 my wife and I decided to build our first home together. Like any large scale project it's important to break up the task into stages. This first post will deal with The design portion.

1- City Hall, Survey, Design and layout
2-Framing/ roofing
3-finishing
4-maintanence

The design process can be challenging

Spend some time with City Hall, they hold all the keys and know all the rules for building a house in your area. Different cities have different building bylaws and within each city can be multiple zones for different building structures. Vancouver BC is a great place to observe these differences as each suburb has drastically different building laws. for example, in the city of Vancouver land owners are allowed to build up to but not exceeding 75% of the property size. Next door in the City of Burnaby, owners may only build 50% of the property size. In the Royal City of New Westminster, the second level of any home can not exceed 80% of the first floor.

Once you know what you can and can not build, compare a list of items you want with a list of the city's bylaws. For example, If it is important for you to have a rental suite on your property but basement suites are not allowed, look into other avenues such as coach homes, (or granny suites) these are separate residences that are apart of the garage opposed to the Main dwelling.

Once you have a vision for what you want the property to look like, you will need to see a surveyor to survey the property. They will provide you with a map of where your property begins and ends, and how the property slopes topographically. This information is then given to Draftsmen who then will design a house plan that will fit within the city requirements. at this point, it is not a bad idea to give the Draftsmen a list of all your needs and wants.

My wife and I went to visit our draftsmen nearly 20 times with detailed computer drawings of exactly what we wanted. Our Draftsmen said he had never seen such detailed drawings of where every room and fixture would go.