Real-life design case study progressing

I know I haven't yet posted any pages on this design in progress, but it's been a matter of considering the best approach to presenting it, and of course, having the time to do it. I am tempted to quite literally post the emails we (the future owners and I) have been trading, as this gives the best sense of the process we're going through. I may know how to use the program to model houses, but I have never worked as an architectural designer for anyone. (Well, not quite true. There is a large fire engine garage in southeastern Ohio that I designed when I was in college, but that doesn't particularly count.) My point is that both of us are learning from this exercise, and I am still getting comfortable with the role.

You may be asking about my liability in this venture. Good question. The answer is that I am not producing plans from which they could build. I am not doing any structural design, whatsoever. In fact, I'm not doing any more than typical homeowners would do if they bought the program and did this design work themselves. Our work is only for illustration purposes. Some builder and/or engineer/architect must still look the design over and figure out how to build it.

Some of us have difficulty visualizing things in 3D. Some of us don't. So far I have taken the floor plans that had been done for them (and somewhat incomplete ones, at that), and I have worked on filling in the missing details. They have provided me with photos of materials, as well as links to websites with material images, and I have been using my neophyte skills with Photoshop to massage and adjust the images to make them suitable for importation into the CAD program. It isn't (in theory) that hard to do. So far, so good.

I'm not sure how long this process will take, though I'm certain we don't have unlimited time in which to work. I certainly don't have an unlimited stock of hours in each day. We have a tentative plan in place--we will start with the most costly parts of the house (such as the kitchen) and work our way down from there. We just settled the question of whether we would have a curved stairway up to the second floor, which the homeowners really wanted, but as it turned out, would have caused too much redesign. It wasn't that we couldn't do it, it was that it didn't fit with other things that were (perhaps) more important. I will post the pages; you will see what I mean.

So, all I've done is blogged a couple of pages announcing this process just getting started, and I've spent about 20-25 hours working on the plan. We've just scratched the surface, of course. And we will talk, later, about my motivation for undertaking this project, as I am not accepting money for my efforts.

Stay tuned.