The Saga: Design Process
One of the first decisions we made was to build our home and homestead from our savings. We did not want to go into debt and have a mortgage. Everything we spent went into equity, and we are debt-free. At our age, that means a lot.
The design process started in earnest in July of 2005. We interviewed several architects and decided to go with a firm from Portland where we had known one of the partners for a number of years. We felt that the portfolio of projects they had done in the past and the their reactions to what we wanted resonated well together. We were also impressed with the fact that theytold us that they had construction experience so they had a concept of what was buildable and what was not.
Since we had very definitive ideas about how we wanted our living space
to function and how it should be designed, we negotiated a co-copyright
on the design. After all, it was going to be just as much--if not more--of
our input as their ideas that the design would reflect. Little did we know
that that particular contractural detail would benefit us later on...
We started the design process and after about two months, we had to suspend everything due to commitments the architects had made to attend some classes in Australia. Of course, they had never told us about those commitments, so there we were...left high and dry and waiting, but with some neat cardboard models as seen on the right.
Undaunted, we waited and when they returned, resumed the process. However, we started to encounter some rough ground. We're not referring to terrain here, but to some attitude issues. We knew what we wanted. Through many hours of research and cultivating relationships, we had the input and support of some of the best minds in energy conservation, green building, and indoor air quality. Yes, we had asked the architects for pushback regarding our ideas, and they gave us feedback. But we did not expect what came next...
We wanted something called a "short basement." This is a relatively
new concept which boils down to a conditioned, unvented crawlspace. It
would be a contributor to energy conservation and indoor air 
quality. Try
as we did, we could not seem to articulate the concept adequately. We sent
articles, drawings, diagrams, but, still, to no avail.
Then, one of the people who was giving us input, a highly-placed official in the Oregon Department of Energy, graciously agreed to participate in a conference call with us and the architects. Surely he would be able to articulate things much better than we could and we could move on from there.
The day of the conference call came and the conversation began. Our contact explained the concept of the short basement, but, much to our surprise, one of the architects began to argue with him! We sat there dumbfounded: here we were getting some pro bono consulting from one of the best, and one of the young architects was actually arguing with him. The call ended, we thanked our contact at the Oregon Department of Energy (yes, I am deliberately leaving names out here), and looked at each other.
We realized that what we had just witnessed fit a pattern that we were desperately trying not to recognize: the architects were more interested in padding their portfolio than giving us the house we wanted. They did not know how to listen, only talk.
We tried to work with them for several more months, but it was impossible. They iced the cake by billing us for work that we did not authorize as well as going off in directions that we had said we didn't want them to go. We terminated our contract with them, and, since we had a co-copyright, took what we had so far and started to find someone else to bring the design to its conclusion.
We found a house designer, someone who had gone to architecture school
but had decided not to get his license. Rather,
he had chosen to hang out his shingle as a designer.
He also claimed to have construction experience so he could advise us on
potential designs that might be too costly.
We reviewed what we had thus far, and proceded from there. Actually, it went quite well, and we ended up with the design that we wanted. The design process wrapped up in November of 2006.