Homestyling Design

Ken was very nice to work with and the draft drawings were clear. Though we had a lengthy list of needs and desires for our older house, he started off with two drawings: a minimum scope of work that didn't meet our needs, and a maximum scope of work that was beyond the aesthetics for the house. This was probably a suitable approach just to check that we weren't under-thinking what was possible, and we eventually worked to achieve a result in the middle that met the requirements. However, it seemed like I had to do a lot of the design work myself to explain what we wanted to fit the old house style (which wasn't irregular in any way). The drawings that we got initially were only layout, not elevation, and we had to ask for some elevation sketches to ensure things matched up properly, and the hand sketches were quite good. Ken sent the layouts to an architect he regularly works with and then things got rough. The architect drew up some nice looking layout and elevations, but the measurements were way off in places. I provided the proper measurements but they didn't get applied completely it seemed. I didn't think it would be necessary to nit-pick every detail but it turned out that way, and still a number of details were missed. Suffice it to say that an accurate architectural drawing and measurements up front are extremely important. For an extra fee we had the architect do the city approval process for us, and it was extremely quick. Given the issues with the architecture, we wish that we were provided draft elevation designs to review before going to the architect, so we felt a bit more in control of window sizes and placements, particularly since it's an older house and we were trying to keep the style. Even details such as soffits and trim matter because framers have to frame to accommodate, and we ended up with contemporary-styled soffits and trim that didn't match the house very well. Further, the Seattle city inspector was puzzled about how overbuilt the framing was, and indicated that it?s difficult to get every designer, architect, and builder in the region to be more green.