From pilot to contractor (26): What I learned about ‘Form Follows Function’

Contributing Editor John Bleasby wraps up his home building project, and his journal, with this final installment.

It is finished. The patio stones are laid, the pool is filled with water, and the patio furniture placed. After six months of construction plus another month of landscaping and grading, I can now say that our house is ‘complete’. The vans, trucks, the Bobcats and the wheelbarrows are gone.

Our home building project started as a lifestyle vision. We forced ourselves to imagine how we wanted to live the next 20 years in our new house, and then designed and built accordingly. In other words, form followed function. Although I did not start this project seeing myself as my own General Contractor, that’s how it turned out, so that meant I had to execute the vision to the last detail.

Vision Realised: All our main living spaces, including the pool and patio, are on a single level

What a huge learning experience. What an exercise in discipline, organization and time management. And if we were to identify the single most important issue during the entire time we would have to say, ‘Staying true to the vision.’ Without a vision there can be no design. Without a design there can be no plan, no budget, and consequently no project at all.

Wearing two hats, customer and contractor, forced me to stay on top of our vision, questioning myself continually. I wonder: how many professional contractors keep clients tuned to their vision? In other words, are you and your customers on the same page?

The basic principle of our vision involved designing and building a house that provided all our living requirements on one level. Sure, there are stairs leading to lower-level storage, workshop and spare bedroom areas, but our day-to-day living space had to be on a single level. All doorways, entrances, shower stalls, etc. had to be wheelchair accessible. There had to be natural light dominating the entire inside of the house. Walls and floor surfaces had to reflect that light in order to bring the beautiful outdoors into our home.

Thus it was with the final touch, the pool and patio area. A hillside building site usually means a basement walkout to the patio, pool and backyard spaces. But we were firm in our vision of a single-level living space. We built up the patio and pool area using 100 per cent of the excavated soil from the basement and pool. The only imported earth was topsoil. As a result, our interior living space blends seamlessly with our outdoor space.

Is our vision the same as your client’s vision? Is our modern, minimalist style agreeable to everyone? Likely not. However, the key is that there WAS a vision, and it was respected to the end. True, I was not that hands-on contractor who worked alongside the trades with tools in my hand. However, my strengths were organisational skills and the discipline required to stay ‘on vision.’

If I have any advice to offer the professional contractor, it would be this: concentrate on those latter skills perhaps even more than the former in order to keep client’s projects moving in the right direction.

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