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Building a house, and doing good interior design, is a multi-step process, and one that benefits significantly from project management skills. As someone considering entry into the home sales and design business, this project management training is essential to your success.
First, every home construction project and design project has an end state. In project management, defining your "victory conditions", or success margin, is the first step towards getting a project rolling. The end state of home design is having a house for sale that’s attractive and built to the client specifications.
Like all project management tasks, defining "success" early on is critical. If you enter a large project without defining success, the likely outcome is "project creep" – where specifications change, and new features and materials get added to the project over time, and the project rapidly turns out late, over budget, and likely not as good as it could’ve been had it had a tightly focused goal from the get go.
A "good house" has a lot of regional variables
Now, on a project as complicated as a house, defining what constitutes a "good house" has a lot of regional variables. For example, some homes emphasize the view, or the interior space layout, while others, particularly in the modern market, emphasis "green" construction techniques and energy efficiency. A lot of this will be defined by your client’s needs, and what they’ll want in a home as well as the parcel of land they’re building on, and large chunks will be set by the architecture firm laying out the floor plans.
If you’re doing home design directly, there are several features that, with a proper project management type of approach, can differentiate your home design from others. First and foremost, decide if you’re doing custom floor plans, or modifying an existing floor plan sets – custom floor plans will cost more, and take more time, but give you the flexibility of offering your client exactly what they want to see. Look for floor plans with open space, access for airflow, and good natural lighting with a shade break if it’s to the south. We mentioned "green" construction techniques before – these can vary from choice of materials (clay packed hay bales for insulation) to construction techniques (using low impact drainage for laying the foundation slab) to building the home around energy conservation, like using radiant heating under concrete floors, or putting integrated solar panels and similar items to minimize the utility bills on the house, and even allow the owner to sell power back to the electrical utility. Project management and home design has a lot of aspects!
Once you’ve determined exactly what sort of home you’re building for your clients, it’s time to start working backwards from the date of completion. Before the new owners can move in, the house has to be inspected by the local municipality. Before the municipality can inspect the construction, the utility runs have to be put in, but not covered by the interior walls, and they have to be inspected by the gas, water and electric utilities.
Before that can happen, all the joists have to be constructed, and the floors laid down so that workers can walk on them, and before that has to be done, the foundation laid, the furnace put in, and any special energy efficiency features need to be put into the floor plans.
Think of project management in home construction as making the "recipe" and "detailed instruction list" of what needs to be done in what order to make the entire project come off without a hitch. It’s at this stage that you’ll book the appointments with the architect to modify the blue prints, and with the consulting architect, you’ll make appointments for the concrete contractors to come and lay the foundation slab, laying out the time needed to finish the job correctly. Once you have an estimate for when the slab will be completed, it’s time to buy the construction materials. Now, it doesn’t make sense to have all the construction materials delivered at once – you’ll need a good, detailed plan for what will be needed when, and when items will be completed, so that you have exactly the right materials and tools and professionals on hand at the right time.
Every plan, even one doing home construction, has to have some flexibility in it, some slack for contractors who don’t show up, delays caused by weather, people getting sick, or parts or materials running out or becoming more expensive. Make sure you build that into your working budget for man-hours and money, as part of the process. Some parts of construction are natural choke points – this is the sort of work that, until it’s completed, nothing else can be done. A good construction foreman will walk you through choke points and ways to work towards them in parallel, so that a work stoppage at one part of the job won’t have your entire construction and contracting team sitting around.
Once the primary structural elements are done, and the basic roof is up, it’s time to run in your utility lines and electrical wiring for the home. This is one of the most expensive jobs to be done, and should be handled by a qualified professional. Faulty wiring is one of the chief causes of house fires in the United States, and it’s completely avoidable.
The last part of constructing a home is putting on the final roofing material, putting in the windows, doing the interior painting and laying down the carpets, or acid washing the concrete floors. All of the touches that turn a box with four walls and a door into a home that will be cherished by its owners for years, and the source of pride and fond memories as they raise their family.
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