Constructing a custom home consists of many steps—surveying the lot, excavating, pouring a foundation, framing, roofing, installing mechanicals like plumbing and electrical, performing “finish” tasks like trimming and painting, applying exterior finishes, etc. And many factors can influence the schedule or timeline of building a custom home. Weather, product ordering delays and lead times, timeliness of decorating decisions, the number of changes, etc. all can have an impact on the schedule.
Part of our objective with the Outdoor Living Show Home is to take you on a journey of the custom homebuilding experience. A good place to start is with a brief discussion about the overall building process in general and the construction process specifically. In describing the building and construction processes, we will use a framework and nomenclature that matches the different categories and sub-categories used to catalog the continuing blog posts to our site. More on this shortly…
In thinking about the overall building process for a custom home, we generally speak in terms of four major steps:
Many activities happen within each of these steps, and, depending on many factors, the time required to move through each step varies, sometimes greatly. Below is a sampling of the activities that take place in each step:
Though not a comprehensive list of every single activity that goes in during the building process, the above graphic gives you a good sense of many of the activities. As we take you on the journey of building the Outdoor Living Show Home, you will be exposed to all of the activities listed above and more. We will describe each activity in more detail, discuss any special considerations or challenges in this particular project, and, where appropriate, provide pictures to better clarify the activity.
As mentioned earlier, the above graphic provides the framework for how we will categorize our blog articles. We will organize the blog articles by category and, where necessary, sub-category. All articles dealing with the construction of the home can be found under the blog category of “Outdoor Living Home Construction.” There will be sub-categories for each of “Design & Costing,” “Lot Preparation,” “Construction” and “Occupation.” Construction will be further broken down by “Foundation Stage,” “Framing Stage,” “Interior Rough-in Stage,” “Interior Finish Stage” and “Exterior Finish Stage.”
From a timeline perspective, designing and building a custom home can take anywhere from 14 months and up—usually two to three months and beyond for design, and 12+ months to build. For the Outdoor Living Show Home, we began design in October of 2009, broke ground in April of 2010, and are targeting a June 2010 completion and home tour. A graphical breakdown of the schedule looks like this:
Throughout the building process, we will be updating the blog with articles and pictures of the construction activities as they happen. As mentioned above, these articles and pictures will be categorized and cataloged by the different stages and sub-stages depicted in the timeline and other graphics presented here.
We look forward to taking you on the journey!
