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INTRODUCTION
REVIEW
Q: What is this e-book all about?
A: How to better design a home and how to better build a home.
Q: How can you be so bold as to say "better"?
A: Which is another way of asking, "Who are you?" We authored this e-book, my partner and I in Before The Architect.
It's a compilation of what we've done hands-on since the ‘60s. Did, failed or succeeded, studied, learned, tried again and again. We worked mostly with homes. Sometimes, we worked with commercial and industrial projects; but, mostly, homes.
We're always searching what's out there in home design and home construction guidance, wondering where's the rest of it.
Q: What's new or different about your e-book?
A: What isn't different?
It's about lessons learned from the granite knee of life experience in custom home design and custom home construction. It's not pin-head. It's both feet on the ground. How-to. Why. Disciplined exposition in outline format predominates; lucid, concise commentary brings you back to the drawing board and jobsite.
This e-book uniquely joins thought and practice. Examples:
- Electrical. There's a national code for minimum safety. Not convenience, not durability, not more than minimum safety. And there are plenty of ways to design-in and build-in all three, including more than minimum safety - but not in the code. Who really wants a receptacle on the side of an island or peninsula where little Geoffrey or sweet Gloria can hook the coffee pot cord? Really.
- Tell me someone else who
- Shows you how to help contractors take the plan set and the owners seriously?
- Prohibits OSB framing . . . ABS pipe . . . wiring lights and receptacles on the same circuit?
- Quotes Auden, Alexander, Einstein, and Potter relative to home design and construction?
- Presents the bell, book, and candle on deck, knee brace, and ledger structure?
- Modifies grade beams – how and why and where?
- Remembers when #3 rebar was common?
- Specifies an L/480 sawn lumber span table and defines how to approximate it again and again from lesser table?
- Stuff no one very, very likely showed you or your contractor about shearwall construction?
- Offers simple, serious consideration about fire safety
- In stairways?
- In residential elevators?
- Explains
- When daylight is not interior light and shows you a way – sometimes – to overcome the darkness?
- About the metrics and methods to help assure adequate attic ventilation?
- How you might consider to structure for big holes with big windows and big doors in a big wall, defending against wibble-wobble instability?
- A way to gauge adequacy of dining space, including the table, anywhere in the home?
- Lighting. Manufacturers are busting butt to make fluorescents more vision-friendly and there's plenty of literature about aging eyes' naturally characteristic needs for more illumination of specific sorts. No one I know of puts those two together with a comprehensive design and application methodology, except in this e-book . . . and in Before The Architect's practice.
- Radon Mitigation.
- Here's the only concise presentation I've ever seen and I had to design it from scratch.
- Where else will you find
- 105 pages on home plan set layout?
- 154 pages on schedules and details?
- Any pages at all on on-site conduct?
- Foundation. There are all sorts of materials and methods available to fortify a placed foundation and slab-on-grade against degradation over time. Here's where to find out about redundancy and appreciate it.
- Schedules and Details . . ..
- Bathroom exhaust fans
- Ceiling fans
- Light flutter
- A tip on cabinet layout to save you big bucks
- Watershed runoff management
- Common-sensical attic venting
- Coherent plans for interior trim
- Coffered ceilings
- Interior and exterior arches
- Masonry watertables
- Natural daylighting, etc.
Q: Would you put that list in bullet format, please?
A: OK. OK.
Q: Want more?
A: No mas.
Q: What brings you to do this e-book?
A: It's as written: "How did we get started? When we were young enough to go down the street alone, we'd go down the street and visit residential and commercial building sites. The older we got, the farther down the street we went.
"We observed, thought, asked, listened, learned, did, shared. Still are hard at it. Experience tracks and targets meaning, forms a community of itself; the greater the experience, the greater the community. Now that's entertainment."
Q: Is there a beginning to this e-book?
A: Sure, it's as written – ‘down the street alone.' It's what we've lived, since there were no other comprehensive guides back then that we knew of. Doing. Asking. Observing. Thinking about it. That started in the ‘60s and before.
Q: So you've been writing since the ‘60s?
A: No. We've been learning since the ‘60s. Testing. Refining. The writing started in 2000. Then, the first edition wasn't even a couple dozen pages or so. It was one-of-a-kind back then.
Q: Well, how big is the e-book now in its 2Q08 edition?
A: 738 pages total. In .pdf and Word .doc. 11-page Table Of Contents. 163 figures. The Index is 39 pages. 150,457 words. It's a load. Facts. Insights. Whassup with all sorts of aspects of home design and home building.
Q: Why do you do this?
A: 1. Because I can; it's my day job . . . part of my day job. Altogether: client enterprises, the e-book, e-articles, the website. That's my day job. Every day job.
2. Writing down about unending, unrelenting research, client work, observation, conversation helps to better serve clients – helps them understand, embrace, engage major matters – and others who may not be clients, but who would be a whole lot better off knowing what they don't when it comes to the design and construction of their new home, their major remodel.
3. Folks ought to get the home they want and need, not the joint the other guys design and build. "It's your dream home; it's their business."
4. Helps me keep track of myself. Helps my partner keep track of me, too.
Q: When do you find the time?
A: When clients are thinking things over and more work hereabouts dare not get done ahead of that thinking. In the meantime, as hours pass, as days pass, new perspectives, new knowledge gets cryptically written in one place for subsequent development of text and figures for the e-book. Sometimes, an e-article gets developed as a precursor to e-book entries. We e-article publish on searchwarp.com.
The previous e-book edition was 9 months ago, 2Q07. Used to republish quarterly, but the press of other business doesn't permit it nowadays.
There was no major time to do much since then, except to keep building up the list of to-be-dones, and make minor contributions from that list, until about 3 weeks ago or so. Clients had several major moments to resolve and the writing started in the hiatus. 109 pages of new material in this new edition. Morning, noon, and night.
Now, the clients are starting to work through the design and construction matters before them, and, just about in-time, we're ready to reconnect.
Q: What's in the e-book? . . . not the facts again, but rather the substance.
A: The usual suspects about recognizable subjects of home design and home building and the unusual suspects about related aspects - some serious and some fun.
The usual suspects include a long, l-o-o-n-n-n-g-g list of Standards:
- Conduct On-Site
- Conformance to Formal Standards
- Materials
- Fastening
- Layout
- Foundation
- Framing
- Electrical
- Water Plumbing
- Venting
- Heating, Ventilating, Air-Conditioning
- Finishing
- Adaptable House
- Schedules
- Details
- Safety
The unusual suspects include, among others . . .
- A raft of pithy and poignant quotes of this old boy
- A candid, open letter to a young home design wannabee
- Hundreds and hundreds of specific, narrative comments – like sidebars – putting depth, breadth, and personality from the granite knee of life experience – to otherwise rigorously disciplined entries in outline form
- A suggested, annotated reading list of design and construction literature
- An article on how to design curved stairs in two dimension
- 19 Deadly Sins
Q: More bullets, please?
A: Yeah.
Q: Deadly Sins?
A: Yep. 19. It's our honest-to-goodness list of those things said or done that'll get a prospect or a client off the Before The Architect reservation faster than cracked corn through the Christmas goose. We can (but not so far) list each by names of the dopes, dizzies, dissemblers, desparates, desparados, and deadbeats that brought those 19 alive.
Q: What's not in the book?
A: Technical hugger-mugger. Some things have to be done by others. It's why God made engineers.
A few aspects that are thinnish, because we've been lucky enough to have come across real pros before we had much time to take it in ourselves. HVAC and water plumbing, particularly come to mind. Roofing, too.
Interior decoration. We don't pick out lamps and linens. Not yet. Could. But not so far, except on our own account.
And then there's the unknown, the things yet to learn for the first time or rethink or advance in understanding.
Q: So the book's not finished?
A: When I'm over and done, then the book is, too.
Q: And to get it?
A: Our website.
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