Stephanie A. Wascha's Blog, page 3

Books to help inspire, answer questions and more!

Below are books that I recommend for various reasons. Some are useful, some are entertaining, some are both, and one isn’t even about architecture! Check back periodically, as I will try to update this list as I find books I think you will find useful and enjoy.

First and foremost… MY BOOK! Stay tuned… I will be launching my new book in February of 2017!

I teach homeowners how to stop spinning madly out of control before they even begin their project. Everyone needs some sort of help finding enough pertinent information that will enable them to begin making decisions and organizing their priorities. Not just you. In addition to the need for actual hard-to-come-by information, everyone makes the same mistakes when beginning this process… truly… and I am handing you a means of avoiding those pesky mistakes on a silver platter! Additionally, I teach you what variables you should focus on, which you have no control over (…yet) and how to guesstimate budgets so you can formalize your goals. I also go one step further and provide sage advice on how to avoid stringing your partner up from the rooftop by his or her toenails. Trust me, I’ve seen it all and I’m giving you a sneak peek on what to do and not do to properly prepare, save money and lower your stress level before you even call an architect. If you are wondering how to begin categorizing your various project ideas and want answers to questions you don’t even know you need yet, this book is for you. Click here if you want to be on the mailing list to receive a free digital copy just before I launch!

Sarah Susanka:

Sarah Susanka is an award winning author who started the Not So Big movement to help homeowners, architects and builders think about the idea of HOME in a different way. She has since authored and co-authored many books, all of which are written so anyone can understand its principles, and she brilliantly uses graphics and photographs to help depict those ideas. I am only going to mention two (of many) below, but not because the others are less helpful. I tend to focus on providing information for those of you who haven’t yet contracted an architect. As a result, if you are a homeowner looking to build, these are the two you should start with, because they will support a new understanding of concepts that will ultimately help you nail down the list of priorities you will take to your architect. The others delve into more detailed design concepts like symmetry, designing on an axis, landscaping techniques, etc.  All are brilliant. Either way, you will get hooked and most likely end up purchasing them all. Clearly a lot of love was put into her books, and anyone about to embark on changing his or her home could benefit from every one of them.

The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka

This book was the impetus to the Not So Big movement that Sarah began. It is an oldie but a goodie as the information provided will forever be pertinent.  It describes in detail how important it is that you focus on quality over quantity and compares huge, uncomfortable mansions to thoughtful small/medium sized well-functioning homes in a way that will make you want to saw your house in half. If nothing else, it will help you ruminate over the spaces you THINK you need before you spend loads of money building them. Make a list of the tasks you do in your home (cooking, kids doing homework, eating, working, etc.) and use this book to learn how to creatively utilize one space to house many of them. You will spend more of your hard earned money ensuring your home is unique and functions perfectly for you, instead of adding 16 different boring sheetrock lined rooms in which you do each individual task separately. This is a great pre-project read!

 

Not So Big Solutions for Your Home by Sarah Susanka

This is less of a big principle book and focuses more on individual rooms and ideas, which will get you focused on the specifics necessary for a successful project. For example, she describes in great detail what you should consider when building a Kitchen, Mud Room, Entry, etc., along with explaining why lighting, varying ceiling heights and the like are so important to a well-designed home.  You will learn something about everything from site selection to window benches.  Again, she uses photographs and drawings to depict her ideas, so anyone can understand them. We all have a Kitchen, Bathroom, Living Room, etc., and we believe we know how best to use them. Read this book and you will revisit all of those assumptions, because learning how a trained professional would use those spaces differently will open your eyes to a whole new way of looking at your home.

 

SoulSpace by Xorin Balbes

I was pleasantly surprised to find this book. The topics that I write about are very dear to my heart, because I want to help people get the most out of any modifications they make to their home, and Xorin apparently has an affinity for those same topics. Xorin has focused on a few key ideas and expanded on them in a way that specifically describes the map you should follow from the beginning assessment phase all the way through to celebrating your finished new home. His didactic writing inspires you to assess what you have, purge what you don’t need (including emotional baggage attached to physical objects which is particularly interesting), dream big, allow those dreams to become a reality (which some of us can have difficulty with) and ultimately celebrate your new SoulSpace. I think it is absolutely wonderful that he spends and entire chapter on celebrating the end results of your hard work, because those end results are why you painstakingly (temporarily) uproot your family and spend your hard earned cash. Those goals can get lost with the natural stresses inherent in building or remodeling a home. By reading that last chapter, you are likely to return to your list of goals when the going gets tough, because he inspired you from the very beginning by pointing out the wonderful end results that are to come.

 

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Condo

One of my blog posts is titled Clean Out Your Crap Before You Bother Modifying Your Home (Click here to read that blog). How can you possibly determine how much space you require if a quarter of your house is filled with crap you don’t need, use or even like???  Some of the coined phrases in this book seem a bit silly to me personally, but if you are trying to learn how to make a major change in your storage habits, then she’s your gal. She describes a mindset you should adopt to make your temporary need to clean a long term fixture in your daily routine, so your clutter doesn’t sneak up on you again in a few years. Heck, she even describes how and what to fold, box up or hang, and how to best store it. Sound nuts? It’s got more 5 star ratings on Amazon than a dozen other best sellers combined! Odd, I know, but it is helpful nonetheless.

 

South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition by Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

If you are mid-construction (or even pre-construction) and frustrated by your project, are tired of living out of a suitcase, or your contractor just found a colony of carpenter ants happily munching on your wall studs, you may very well need something to help put your nightmare into perspective, and believe me when I say that this book will do exactly that. This is NOT a book about architecture if you hadn’t guessed that from reading the title. This is the real diary and descriptions authored by Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton from the early 1900s. Picture being on a wooden boat in the middle of unexplored parts of the Arctic Ocean (terrifying), where the temperatures frequent -35 degrees Fahrenheit (brrrrr), the sun departs for months at a time (worse than Seattle), you are sans Patagonia and North Face (that is just crazy talk!), and literally everything  you can imagine (or can’t imagine) is going wrong. You know that feeling you get when watching a movie and painful event after painful event keeps crashing down on the main character causing you to think, “Come on, this is getting to be a bit over the top. No one has THAT much bad luck.” Well, that thought pattern begins when you are only 25% of the way through the book… and it is all painfully real. So if you need a little something to help put your project woes into perspective, there is nothing better at making you realize exactly how good we all have it than this book.

Again, check back periodically, as I will definitely add any books to this list that I believe will be useful to you.

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If You Agree With Everything Your Architect Does, You May Be Doing Something Wrong

If you agree with everything that your architect says and/or draws, then you may be doing something wrong. I’m not claiming your architect is inevitably flawed, that she doesn’t have great ideas and that each design move isn’t intricately and brilliantly tied to the one before. What I am saying is, if you don’t have questions and comments (indicated by only saying things like, “I love it!” or, “That’s perfect!” after each meeting without follow-up questions and comments) then frankly, you may not be picking up on what they’re putting down. This may lead to surprises come construction time (and not the fun surprise birthday party kind). You may think you understand everything (or as much as you believe you need to), but there is no way that your architect can nail down all of your goals, hopes and dreams for your project perfectly without your input. You should be making inquisitive statements like, “How does this affect…?”, “Is this option more expensive than…?” or, “I don’t yet have a good understanding of how that space will feel. Can we go over it again?”

 There are simply too many details that need to be just so, dimensions that must to be specific to your needs, materials and colors that need to be what you are expecting, etc., to have EVERYTHING be right all of the time. Trust me; we love to hear how much you adore what we’ve designed. What architect doesn’t love to have his or her ego stroked? However, if that’s all we hear time and time again, something is usually amiss. It usually means you aren’t processing all of the detailed information, not wholeheartedly reading the drawings, or just not hearing what we are saying. I don’t mean to sound brash, but sometimes folks need a swift kick in the pants to make a point, and this particular point is one you don’t want to miss.  

 Designing your home is an extremely personal and detailed process, and if given two options to choose from, you should inevitably be willing and able to assess the pros and cons to make your selection. Do you want your house designed with a modern flat roof or a traditional pitched roof? Pretty straight forward, right? However, when you’ve just begun your 300th meeting to receive an update on the alignment of the walls with the floor tile, which aligns with the cabinets which need to be ordered next week, it gets a bit more complicated.  It wouldn’t be uncommon for you to enter a trance like state, hear white noise, and start wondering how much longer you have before you need to return to work or pick up your kid. When you are jolted back into the conversation by your architect questioning, “Does that make sense?”, your conscience takes over and out comes, “Sure, yes, definitely. I love it!” If this happens 2 or 3 more times, then you’ve just missed out on the antecedents of enough information to turn a ripple into a tsunami. What is the resultant tsunami you ask? Let me use the above example to expound on this a bit. Upon verbal approval of the wall and tile alignment, your architect proceeds down the long path of drawing, detailing, dimensioning and coordinating the information necessary to carry out the list of defined goals from said meetings. She produces plans for which you pay a pretty penny. The plans are distributed to contractors, sub-contractors, permit specialists and the like, each of whom proceeds down his or her required path, commencing with the instructions provided on those drawings. Each respective party reviews the drawings, crunches numbers, provides pricing and writes up estimates that are given to contractors. Contractors communicate with the architect to get clarifications and compile the massive amount of information into their estimates. Construction begins, materials are ordered, and the crew is set in motion. Again, all of which is a direct result of the decisions from the design meetings, and paid for by you. The event that takes this freight train from full speed ahead to a screeching halt occurs when you arrive on site, and are confused about something you see. Now that it’s real (and not part of a design meeting), you finally ask, “How does this affect….?”, or “Is that more expensive than….?” Only now do you process the information that should have been processed eons ago, and you want to make a change. Don’t get me wrong, it is your house. Change what you need to in order to create your perfect oasis. Just understand that with this change comes a price tag. In addition, it can be accompanied by frustration when you thumb through the drawings to find the information right there in painstaking detail, and you don’t recall having had a discussion approving whatever it is you now wish to change. No one can remember everything, which is why we have drawings in the first place. However, as an owner, you are required to sign off on the drawings prior to construction beginning. Your review is what architects count on to ensure you know what is going on.

 Now, I could also go into a similar diatribe directed at architects about the importance of meeting minutes, good details and how to verify that clients understand what will eventually be built. (However, if one hears, “I love it!” or, “That’s perfect!” you can see how one might think there is a mutual understanding.) Nonetheless, that would be fruitless, because architects are not my audience. You are. As such, I’m focusing on giving you the inside scoop about common mistakes that lead to tsunamis, in hopes that you will arrive at design meetings with your thinking cap on and armed with questions. Or, at the very least, with a cup of coffee and the confidence to interrupt and ask, “How does this affect…?”or, “Is this option more expensive than…?” or, “I don’t yet have a good understanding of how that space will feel. Can we go over it again?”

 You are partially responsible for the success of your project because it is a team effort. Namely, you must pay attention, verify what’s being discussed at your meetings and take the time to read and understand your drawings…which are more accurately called, “Contract Documents.” They are, in fact, your “contract” with your contractor. When was the last time you entered into a contract for anything totaling tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars and DID NOT read the contract? Not understanding the drawings is doing exactly that. By the time your architect is done with the permit drawings, you should be able to verbally describe what each space is going to look like (with the drawings as a cheat sheet because again, no one can remember everything). I don’t expect you to have a full 3D vision of the space in your head. Most people can’t do that which is why they hire an architect. However, you should have a basic understanding of the space, and a better than basic understanding of anything that is high on your list of priorities. I even recommend doing a few spot checks on things that are particularly important to you, like ensuring the soaking tub listed on the drawings is the one you are expecting if there had been a confusing number of options. Get out your measuring tape and double check that the dimensions noted in the Dining Room will accommodate your great grandmother’s heirloom table and chairs. Ensure you are aware that the double height Living Room accent wall is hot pink. Get my drift? Take an active role in creating your Contract Documents, and then read them when they are done. You will thank me later. 

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