My Home Inspire Ideas

The stages of building your log home are like any other technique required to build products from appliances to airplanes. The best products start at the drawing board with superior design and development producing superior products Building a home requires many building trades to finish the project. Everyone is interested in saving money. A common mistake that a lot of people make is removing some of the vital trades required for construction with the belief of saving that money. Design and development is one of the leading areas where people think they can reduce costs by discarding that phase from the construction of their home. Most people will build one home in there lifetime so education in the necessity of professionally prepared construction drawings is vital. As a licensed building official and design professional I will show you how proper design and development will actually save you money. All areas of the country are governed by building codes. Some less populated areas have less strict enforcement of the building codes, but that doesn’t mean that building codes in those areas don’t exist. Building codes exist to protect you, not to be inconvenient or cost prohibitive. Building codes are there to ensure the safety, energy efficiency, and accessibility of your home. We demand no less in every car we purchase. We want our cars safe for our family, we want our cars energy efficient so we can afford to drive them, and we want them accessible to all. So why do some people go to great lengths to avoid these same standards in the homes we build by not having professionally designed, code compliant drawings? In any construction project, simply put, proper design and developmental plans pay for themselves. Project costing is next to impossible to preform from simple depictions on graph paper. Materials can not be accurately calculated without the specific details plans provide. Without an accurate list of materials you will certainly over pay for extra materials to cover all the unknowns. Now add in some labor to assemble all these “mystery” materials and you can see there is no money being saved here, just waste. Inaccurate estimates waste thousands of dollars with lost dollars increasing in magnitude as the cost of the home rises. All of this wasted money could be prevented up front with proper design and development resulting in a highly detailed set of plans and specifications. Contractors rely on construction documents and drawings to do their job which is assembly. Without competent design and development the contractor like the estimator has to work with unknowns. Your contractor needs to make a profit to stay in business so he has to cover these unknowns with supposition whether real or imagined. Unknowns cost YOU money. Lets take one component of a typical house, the roof system. There are many ways to frame a roof system in a log home. Now lets say in this example the costs range from $30,000. 00 to $40,000. 00. A contractor without construction drawings assembles the roof for $40,000. 00. $40,000. 00 out of your pocket. However, a professionally prepared set of construction drawings could have detailed a way to assemble that same roof system for $30,000. 00 saving you $10,000. 00! Would you pay $3,000. 00, $4,000. 00, even $5,000. 00 or $6,000. 00 for a set of construction drawings that saves you $10,000. 00? You bet you would! Now multiply the savings by every element found in typical residential construction! Change orders are another source of wasted money. What happens when the builder builds something you don’t like because of the lack of detailed information? Do you live with it or have it changed to your liking? Who pays for that change? YOU DO! There isn’t a builder around that will build things for you twice without charging you. Plans can eliminate these expenses. The misconception that seems to persist in residential construction assumes that a contractor can assemble a home therefore design and development become trivial and unnecessary. A world full of products without design development where individuals decide how to assemble the parts would be ridiculous and so should that approach be when building a new home. In conclusion J. Krentz Design strongly recommends retaining an independent design professional highly experienced in log home design who will work directly for you to assist you with the design, development, and preparation of quality construction drawings and specifications. (more…)

How do you preserve or integrate the feel, history and sentimental richness of your existing cabin and apply it to your new lake home design? How do you honor the memory while upgrading quality of life at the lake? For some, a grandparent built initial cabin years ago that became a family destination full of rich memories.   Or a parent put up the original cabin and passed it down.   Either way a legacy developed and became an intergral part of what it means to be at the lake. Here are a few design ideas that can transfer some of the original cabin warmth and history to you new lake home. 1.   If original cabin had vaulted wood ceilings, dismantle and re-use in new powder room. 2.   Re-use old doors and hardware incorporating them throughout new lake home.   Or dedicate original doors and hardware in a specific room where you want to emphasize past historical theme. 3.   Re-use original bathroom fixtures in guest bathroom. 4.   Use original logs or timbers as interior accents in living room, dining room or kitchen.   It will take patient care from builder to ensure minimal undue damage occurs. 5.   Save and re-use old fireplace hearth stones or mantel and rebuild incorporating them into new fireplace. Sometimes sentimental attachment is strong enough that the above suggestions just aren’t sufficient.   In those cases I recommend you disassemble original cabin entirely and reconstruct those materials inside new lake home as perhaps the kitchen.   Even if you used only two original walls from the old cabin to form a room, you would preserve significant historical warmth from original cabin. (more…)