Our Top Tips: Play It Smart When You Renovate Your Home

Irwin Weiner ASID - Our regular readers know that Jay and I are renovating our country home's kitchen and the back-entry laundry, powder room, and mudroom areas. We've been thinking a lot about how homeowners need to have their eyes wide open to the realities of renovating, as it's oftentimes an unnatural act and an extreme intrusion upon your family's home life. Here are Design2Share's top tips for renovating your home, should you want to tackle something fresh and updated during the new year.

• Protect yourself by hiring experienced, reliable, and highly-skilled professionals for any home renovation project. Personal recommendations from family, friends, and neighbors are best (“They did great work on my addition!”). There are many experienced and reliable contractors working in your community—highly skilled professionals who do business the right way.

• If you're hiring a contractor to do construction, renovation, or repair work on your home, avoid paying cash "under the table" for your job. You’ll likely not get a better deal.

• You need a warranty from the professionals you hire, meaning some kind of recourse for poor workmanship.

• You have the added risk of liability if an injury takes place on your property when you hire non-insured workers for your home projects. You’re better off hiring fully insured and bonded individuals and firms.

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Come See the Houses of Tomorrow!

Irwin Weiner ASID - There's a lot of Disneyland thinking in designing a futuristic home - and we're not talking your run-of-the-mill contemporary architecture. We're thinking of Tomorrowland, the Jetsons, Star Trek, and the house that just landed in your neighborhood from outer space!

I'm fascinated with what houses may look like in the future, and for decades there have been numerous attempts to design and build the future of family homes. Here is a sampling of my favorites; click on each photo to learn more about them.

For more futuristic housing wonders, see Design2Share's Scrapbook Collection of Photographs: Favorite Housing Innovations.

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Hillside House Solves Eco and Sloping Lot Challenges

 

Irwin Weiner ASID - I admire new home design that solves multiple problems. The Hillside House designed by architect and homeowner Scott Lee solves the problem of siting a house on a small lot on an impossibly steep slope. It uses energy-efficient systems throughout - from solar-heated hot water to a home systems control panel that automates light controls and motorized/concealed window shades. Innovative Kohler fixtures reduce water usage in this California home to a bare minimum. Finally, most of the building materials are locally sourced or locally recycled. This home earned its LEED-certified Platinum home status without sacrificing beautiful contemporary design. Watch the following video from Kohler to learn more and tour Hillside House.

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Trendspotting: Homes of the Future

Irwin Weiner ASID - Hats off to the architects, contractors, and city planners who are forward thinking enough to encourage dramatic bursts of new home building that, shall we say, totally breaks the mold.

We're used to seeing the vernacular box house with pitched roof and porch and a yard with the usual outdoor rooms. But today's "homes of the future" are anything but traditional. 

Here are some trends worth noting:

1. Many new communities are being built with low or no carbon footprints. Rainwater gets recycled, sometimes dramatically so as in Meixi Lake, China - a high-rise eco city filters the water that goes into this planned community's lake (below, bottom photo).
2. Dynamic modern architecture from top residential designers (top photo, home designed by architect Mark Koehler and second photo, glass house on stilts designed by Benthem Crouwel) is showcased in planned cities of the future, like beautiful Almere, Netherlands.

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