Getting Started

The Russ Doucette Building Process.

If you are considering building a new home you will soon realize it is a journey of discovering who you are, what you want, how you want to live and where you want to be. This is definitely a chance for you to define your relationship to the world, to your family and to yourself. Creating a home is so much more than the sum of a few parts. 

As with any journey, you’ll want to do some research to help plan your trip. You’ll want to have a sense of what the end result should be and how much it will cost. Having a seasoned and experienced guide like Russ Doucette show you the way will likely mean a more enjoyable, more enriching and overall better journey.

Once you have decided you would like to create your own new home set up a meeting with Russ Doucette. Russ will guide you through the process from start to finish.

Set Goals

Creating a new home for yourself is all about setting goals and taking the steps to achieve those goals. Answering these questions will help set those goals.

• What do you want to achieve? 
  Where do you want to be?
  What will this cost?
• Can it really be achieved? 
  Does plan A make sense? 
• What’s plan B?
• 
  Establish a budget.
• When making your budget, of course you'll begin with what you can afford, and how the cost of your house fits in with your overall plans for the future. When you're ready to get down to details, include everything that will go into the project: the cost of the land, local fees and taxes, design and engineering fees, construction of not just the home but the landscape, plus furniture and decorating. 
  
  Find some land or a neglected older house.
• Where do you want to be? How do you want to live? What are you looking for?

• Plan.
• Plan for the “what if”. Sometimes the first answer is the right answer, sometimes it's the 21st. Just remember not to settle until you've explored all the possibilities; you don't want to say after the project has been built, "We should have done ..."
• Dream Big.
• Building a home from scratch or a renovation, is an exercise in making something that's yours. So dream big and have grand plans. There will be time enough to deal with the realities of budget, zoning and codes.
• Decisions.
• Decisions, decisions, decisions. You'll be asked to make many — more than you can imagine.  Make sure that the details are there so that your home will be uniquely your own and speak to who you are.

Having the right team in place can pay dividends. An architect, a builder and others who can work together and share ideas without criticizing one another will go a long way to helping you keep your sanity.