Article written by Sherin Dev; Follow me on Twitter
You might have decided to build a home. You may have a plan in your mind about how your dream home will be. But, is that all sufficient to build a perfect home? Building an own home is a rare chance the not get to everybody. Once you get that chance, remember lots of planning, efforts and pain involved to that. If not planned well, you may not be able to build your new home in a perfect way. Perfect planning would ensure you have not missed anything and your home has all required features and facilities to stand different from other homes. Here is a master checklist to plan your new home in a better way. I am sure, you will enjoy reading this list and it would help you a lot.
As usual, building of a new home starts from preparation of a master plan. Your master plan should include plans for everything from the beginning to end. Of course, lots of effort and time required to construct a good master plan. However, this master list prepared to help you to ease these tasks. This list have been prepared from self experience, references, ideas and advice from others who already build a home and enjoying it or suffering issues of lack of pre-plan.
1. When do you plan to construct your new home?
While planning to build your own home, naturally this would be the first question to find answer. This answer gives further answers to lots of rising questions. So, first decide the time you are going to build a home. Is it after 2 years, 5 years, 10 years or any time after that? Once the answer received, move to the second step.
2. Decide your location for new house
Your second step is deciding your location for new home. This would help you to have a better understanding on the costs involved to buy land and the construction. When deciding home location, consider you have following facilities ready:
- Access to road
- Available schools
- Hospitals in the location
- Bus stations
- Police and fire stations
- Utility stations and availability of the same
- Churches or other religious homes
- Government offices where you may need to contact regularly
3. Plan finance to construct home
Planning sufficient finance to construct your dream home is the next big step. How could I arrange finance? Is it through start investing now? Selling your old home to build this new home in another location? Any financial companies or banks are ready to finance? if yes, how could I select a best one? These are the general questions comes to the mind at this step. Not surprisingly, this step required lots of efforts to finalize. You may require starting financial planning or investment to fund for your new home in the future. You may require planning to sell your old house by considering and identifying a better. You may require running a lot behind each available financing companies or banks to finalize a good one.
a. If you are interesting to start financial planning or investing for your new home, you need to start the same right away. Approaching a good financial planner would help you to what exactly want to do.
b. If you want to sell your home to construct a new one, you ma required to understand the real price you are going to get through the sale and the best market condition to sell your old home.
c. If you approach a financier for the finance, you required to collect information of all financiers and need to analyze them to identify a best financier.
4. Design your new home
Designing a new home is one of the most difficult tasks in this list. Remember, you may have your own thoughts, plans and ideas about how your new home would be. A better way to confirm you are not missing any of your ideas, note it in a paper time to time. Let each member in your family to participate on the design phase of new home. No one wanted to build a home that looks similar to others, but everyone likes their home should have some special features to stand different. Do it by start your design at the earliest and work hard to come with a right design. Below ideas would work in a better way to get a fantastic design for your home which certainly stands different from others:
a. Pre or post dinner discussion with family members. Don't avoid your kids. They may have better working ideas than yours.
b. Discuss with colleagues and friends
c. Meet people who already constructed home at various places, to understand what all they have missed by lack of plan and what are the difficulties they have faced before and after construction. Note each and every points.
d. Consider your land to determine the size of your new home. Get help from a good architect to prepare a plan which maximize land utilization in a cost effective way.
e. Search in the net to get better designs and specifications to check and design your own.
f. Visit any houses that attracted you and ask the owners to let you see the designs they have used and select the best from that. You can even ask for the copies of their plans.
You are required to determine and finalize the design of your home including front, back and side elevations with full design along with number of rooms and its sizes, to forward further. Required areas, heights, how many storey, type and class of building all should be finalized to proceed with getting necessary permissions and start construction?
5. Do you have all necessary permissions?
However, it is different from place to place, state to state and government to government. You must confirm you have received all required permissions to proceed with your constructions. There may be municipalities or any other governmental organizations involved attesting and/or granting permissions to buy land to build and commission a home. Use the best approaches mentioned below to get information on the required permissions:
a. Contact the people who have already constructed a house in the area where you are planning to build yours. They could able to provide you with the information on all required permissions and where to contact for this.
b. Contact local government offices to understand the procedures and permissions for constructing a new house. They might direct you through proper channels.
c. Get the help of internet to visit government websites to collect available information. Most of the state governments maintain their own websites with all the necessary information required by public.
d. If you are constructing a house through Construction Company, they may help you to provide all the necessary information.
e. Ensure you have contacted, applied and confirmed all permissions for water supply, electricity, gas connections etc. from local office.
I am sure one of the above would work for you.
6. Who will construct your home?
You are now ready with finance, location, approved plan, wonderful design along with all required permissions from authorities. It is the time to decide how and who will construct your home. Whether you are giving the construction of your home as a project to any company or constructing by using your own people? It is highly recommended to supervise the work in each and every point. This would help you to identify the mistakes or any work that is not suitable as per your requirements. Select one of the below options to construct your house:
a. Contact some of the reputed, affordable construction companies. Get information on the project costs as per your design and duration to complete the work. Select the best choices.
b. Once you have shortlisted competitive companies to construct your home, contact them to get information on the housing projects they have built and commissioned. Once received the lists, contact the owners of those homes to understand about the construction company. How well they are to complete the project, quality of the construction, how good they are to finish projects within agreed amount and time etc... Answer to these questions leads you to finalize a company.
c. If you decided to do the construction as your own, find right personnel for the work and be with them always. Agree and finalize the amount to complete the work within time. Select this option once you have time to always be with them throughout the construction process. Understand their labor capacity and specializations thorough contacting the house owners to whom they have previously built the houses.
7. Think about inside your new home
It is time to think about the features and facilities required inside your home. You may work a lot to identify the best suitable to you and family needs. This would includes deciding floors and side walls, windows, air passages, cabinets, heating systems, electrical, electronics, plumbing, security alarm, interior decorations like painting spots, power saving lights, electrical points, bath rooms items, kitchen items, chairs, tables, mattresses, sun light features, cooling features etc. There may be other features that depend on person to person. Discuss with your family members to design internal spaces to meet all your requirements. Consider the climate and its changes to perfectly design the internal part of your house. You should ensure all the items used for the internal design of your houses like wall design materials, plumbing materials, electrical, heating and cooling facilities meet all the standard requirements and from good manufacturers. This would help you to avoid future problems.
Space management should be done in a right way to avoid confusions. Space for all the facilities like electronics items should be decided and allotted in an intelligent way to bring the new home with perfection. Keeping an eye on possible future requirements and space management as per the same would be excellent! Practical and intelligent thinking and planning is must to design the space inside the home in a better way.
8. Outside facilities
When planning to construct your own home, have a design to maximum utilize the land you have. You can have some of the best and nice external facilities like a good garage, an outside store room, parking slot, gardening space, lawn space etc... All these required to plan in advance and carefully. Study on the facilities visiting the facilities and designs by neighbors, friends and colleagues would help you in a better way to plan your space properly.
9. Advanced facilities to your new home
I considered following are the most required, advanced features required by any new home however some of these are highly optional. This may vary depends on person to person, but having this would help you to save lots of money.
a. Rain water harvesting facility: Water rises as the costliest utility for today. Future wars never going to happen on gold, land or money but is sure, for water! Whenever build a new house, you must consider building superior storage space to harvest rain water to the maximum. How much big the facility is, that much you can save money on water! As the best water available in the world, each home should have sufficient facilities to collect maximum rain water as possible. This would helpful to meet all your inside home water requirements thus save lots of money by minimizing the utilization of costly piped water.
b. Installation of solar panels: Electricity is another costliest utility for home owners. Plan your own electricity by installing less cost solar panels in your home. If you like to make your home green compliance, this is the best option to utilize the natural resource to get more electricity by no cost. Solar panels are sufficient for bulbs, heaters and even lights at the garden. Opt this for make your home most cost effective, attractive and save money.
c. Garden - Each home should have a garden. Without a garden, a home cannot consider as perfect. Whether it is for plants, vegetables or mix of both, a garden should be prepared at your surrounding space or in roof as a roof garden. Rose or other flower gardens can fetch you money. A good vegetable garden can meet all your vegetable requirements to home as well as selling the same for earn some money. More over all, it is a good, healthy hobby. My imaginary house should surround with fruit trees. This would not only protect you from heat, but also give you clean air. This would also make your new home more attractive.
d. Drainage system: Whenever planning to build a new house, have a good plan on drainage. Or you are putting your head into the trouble later. Having a good drainage system helps you to lead healthy and clean life.
e. Waste Management: This is other must think facility to have with your new home. You may get lots of materials to make a good waste management plan for home. Waste management helpful to not only expelling your home generated wastes, but can consider as a good earning source. For example, making fertilizers from waste are the best option to sell and earn money. If you don’t want to get money from this, you can use the fertilizer to your garden!
f. External store room: Most of the home has a good storage area inside it, but most of us using the same to store our kitchen or any other kind of household items. Your new house should have well outside storage area to keep all accessories like garden equipments, automotive parts etc. as safe. Consider it.
10. Think about protection and plan it
We are reaching to our final section in this checklist. This section tells you how you can protect your home from all kind of problems. Below are the two options to choose and adapt:
a. Fire fighting systems: This option doesn't mean an industrial level fire management system. But, your home should equip to meet any kind of issues happening from fire and fire related troubles. Have a good fire fighting system in place and always keep it in a safe, but easily accessible place. Get knowledge on how and when to use it. Teach your family about the requirements and how to use it. This would give you a good degree of safety from fire.
b. Insurance Protection: Remember, insurances to protect your home is a must requirement. Unfortunately, most of the people never care about this because of the lack of knowledge. At the time of possession, you should have secured your home with sufficient insurance protections. This can be the protection any from fire, water, natural calamities, burglary or any.
I feel the above check list is superb and highly useful to those who planning to build a new home. Remember, whatever we do, we can do it with 99.5% perfection but still .5% remaining. Nothing can do with 100% perfection. By remembering this fact, I like to inform you to point out any additional points that you wish me to add with this check list. Those who have visited this blog generally see a comment area b below each post, but always forget to appreciate me by adding any simple comment on the post. Appreciate your comments.
Read more...
As you aware, new-years are always the time for people to set new resolutions. Generally at the end of year, most of such pre-set resolutions face failures. Why such failure happening to the resolutions? Normally, due to the impracticality of resolutions or not giving enough attention after set the same. Success of resolutions depends on how much it can influence one and how important it is to the daily life. When turn to finance for life, of course, it has tremendous influence to our daily life. In that context, here are five must required money practices by every person to make the life successful and peaceful. If you still have not set a proper New Year resolution for this 2010, have a look on below to select and set any or all from it as your resolutions.
