Welcome to the home planning blog of Best Home Planning, which is all about planning for a Dream Lifestyle.
BestHomePlanning.com is a learning, planning, living, and product review website for home enthusiasts who believe a lifestyle is worth planning and working for.
Our home planning journey
Are you dreading the process of acquiring your new house, living in fear that you won’t have enough money for a dream home, and that it then might not even answer your specific lifestyle needs.
Very few home enthusiasts know that they need to do their own conceptual planning of their new home, so that agents and architects will understand the accommodation requirements and be able to serve you to the best of their ability.
As a young couple wanting to acquire our first home we diligently searched the market with the view to buy a house, but soon landed up rather confused and purchased a beautiful stand in an upmarket area. We then appointed a well known architect to fire away planning to suit our budget. He really designed the most beautiful home that would fit in very well with the up-market hillside area, but only to eventually, after many months, find from building quotations that it totally exceeded the budget and for us it was totally unaffordable. The architect then proposed that we downsize the planning, which forced us to start considering our preferred lifestyle needs against the new detail planning. Needless to say, the scaled down plans were in no way able to fulfil our needs.
We then realized that to go ahead with the project would be the wrong thing to do as it would either not be affordable or just not comply with our preferred lifestyle needs. And, doing this wrong thing correctly was set to be a disaster.
Having learnt our lesson, we appreciated that it is rather common for home enthusiasts to fear that the home they want to buy or build will be either too costly or just not fulfil their needs and that they don’t realize that there’s much pre-planning to be done before briefing agents and architects.
Your lifestyle is worth planning for.
Nick Oosthuizen
We further learned that the only way to build confidence in managing our home buying or building process is to make sure that we understand and document our basic needs and accommodation requirements before searching and briefing agents and designers.
The fortunate part for us was that we luckily realized the problem before we started to build and waste money. We then decided to rather sell the stand, which we were able to do at a small profit. However, the design expenditure was a total loss, which amount at that stage of our life was massive. Having learnt our lesson, we appreciated that there’s much pre-planning to be done before appointing and briefing an agent or architect.
With our second house we decided to go through our own process of conceptual planning before searching property, starting any form of detail planning and certainly before spending any money on it. This allowed us to ensure that the house and the stand will comply with our needs and allow building processes that will suit our budget cost. Our bond provider was very helpful with this affordability check.
After realising the value of this process we actually decided to build more homes on the side. With all of these homes, we built up confidence to manage the projects ourselves, delivering fantastic savings and attractive profits.
After completing a smart home in an upmarket estate, I received a request from a friend to help his family with their new home and then realised the need to share the process with other home enthusiasts wanting to create an affordable dream home that complies with their lifestyle needs.
So now, you also have the opportunity to learn from our experience.
As most of your life happens at home, the home planning is bound to strongly influence your living lifestyle.
Nick Oosthuizen
Therefore, your lifestyle needs should be carefully considered to inform the planning of your home. Once these needs are clear, it becomes rather easy to expand it to your accommodation requirements and budgeted cost that are required to brief the agent and/or architect for the buying or building of your dream home.
Since the so-called burst of the prime rate bubble caused banks to be very sensitive on affordability, it has become ever so more important to do concept planning before deciding on a home in order to ensure that it will be a great investment and affordable in all respects, ensuring that all costs are considered right from the start. This places emphasis on the conceptual planning and diligent management of your home, irrespective whether you are going to buy, build or renovate.
So, if you are planning to buy, build or extend your dream home that suits your lifestyle…
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