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Design
Few people walk in with a plan and say, “This is exactly the house I want to build.” More often, they say “I’ve looked at hundreds of plans but can’t find exactly the one I want.” Our response?
We Cordially Invite You to a Design Brainstorm!
During this in-person design meeting, we get to know you and share in a creative, free-for-all of new home ideas. There's no such thing as a bad idea in a brainstorm - in fact, the more ideas the better. They lead us to creative solutions to the design and building challenges you might face.
The Design Process
One of the first steps in designing a truly custom, energy-efficient home is to visit your building site. Your site affects your new home's orientation, views, and foundation design. It is the first of six considerations in the design process and is followed by your home's energy envelope; resource, energy, and water efficiencies; and indoor air quality. Read more about Site considerations here.
Your Ideal Floorplan
We can start with anything to create your ultimate floor plan! During early design meetings, we review any hand-drawn sketches you already have for your new home and talk about family size and lifestyle. If you have photos or plans from the internet, magazines, or an architect, bring them along!
The more you’ve thought about how you want to move from room to room in your new home, the more confident you'll be in making design decisions. AND the closer you'll be to the thrill of watching your house take shape on site!
Home-For-Life Design
We encourage you to consider home-for-life or universal design in your new home. This simply means designing a floorplan and including features that make it easy to stay in your home even if you or a family member becomes disabled, injured, sick, or physically handicapped. These amenities are easier and less expensive to build into a new home than retrofitting in later.
A home for life includes all of the rooms you need to live in on one floor. It also features:
♦ Wider than normal hallways and doors to accommodate walkers or wheelchairs;
♦ No or minimal level changes between the garage, entry, and main floor;
♦ Roll-in bathroom showers;
♦ Skylights and increased lighting in areas for reading, working, hobbies, and exercise.
If you have a multi-story home and want to maintain access to all floors, consider planning for, or installing, an elevator or chair lift. In your kitchen, install drawers instead of traditional cabinets under your counters for easy access to contents even when you can no longer easily bend down and get back up. Choose lever door knobs, drawer and cabinet pulls, and floor coverings suitable for life in later years.
Designs You Can Afford to Build
At Stitt Energy Systems, designing your dream home goes hand in hand with helping you design a financial plan to build it. We provide an initial estimate for your preliminary design and then, if we need to modify your floorplan to bring it in line with your financial plan, we do! We have dozens of options to choose from. Open dialog is important during this stage to ensure you are comfortable with both your design and your estimate. We answer questions, exchange ideas, and verify changes to your plan in face-to-face and on-line meetings and by email and phone.
Working Drawings
We ensure the craftsmen who build your high performance home understand how to construct each part of it by providing them with detailed working drawings. These drawings list specific materials, dimensions, load bearing calculations, R-Values, U-Values, depth of excavation, and seasonal angles—all the “green building rocket science” that 
makes your house structurally sound and energy efficient. The drawings cover everything from the footings and foundation to the roof.
We provide similar plans for permitting, bidding, energy raters, appraisers, and bankers. We don’t cut corners on working drawings – they are integral to cost savings and building high quality and high performance homes.
