What is Value Engineering? Why it Actually Improves Your Home Design

Value engineering is something people dread in their custom home journey. The initial design process feels fun and free, then suddenly the value engineering process forces you to refine your designs to fit your budget. The price to build of the initial unedited design is often higher than expected.

Value engineering is the process of designing your dream home to fit your budget. Value engineering is a phase most homeowners have heard about before, and few look forward to. But perhaps unjustly.

Many people associate value engineering with sacrifice. They think the fun part of the project is over, and now it’s time to figure out what you have to give up to stay on budget.

But At Assembly, we see value engineering differently. In our experience, value engineering doesn’t make a house worse. It makes it better, every single time.

What Is Value Engineering?

Value engineering is the process of reviewing a home’s first design to get the most out of every dollar. It looks at the layout, square footage, structure, materials, and systems. Value engineering makes sure the design creates real value for the people who will live in the home.

 

Why Initial Designs are Often Over Budget

Designing a home is exciting! It’s something people have often looked forward to for a long time. When you sit down with the design team and start imagining your future life, it’s natural for your ideas to evolve and expand. Perhaps you want a bigger kitchen island, an extra guest room, or taller ceilings in the living space. Maybe you want to add a bonus room that could be an office, a gym, or “something else someday”.

Each new idea can make sense initially, but when multiple ideas are added to the design that aren’t used in day to day life, it can push a design well beyond what you can afford to build.

This is especially common when the design and construction process happen separately. When you work with a separate architect and build team, after the design gets finalized, it then goes to the builder where you learn the price for the first time. Sticker shock happens often. When the design and build team are separate, value engineering becomes a rescue mission. It can feel like losing pieces of the home you already fell in love with.

This is why at Assembly A+B, we combine the design and build process into one firm. It means less surprises for you. Want to book a free consultation with us? Click here.

The First Design Is the Rough Draft

Here’s what we’ve learned from our experience: the first version of a house is a rough draft. The version after value engineering is the refined, finished product.

A writer wouldn’t publish their first draft without first editing it. Custom homes work the same way. When you look over a design in the value engineering phase, you start to understand what is really important to you. The spaces you’ll use every day get prioritized. The rooms that you designed “just in case” are either solidified or make way for something better.

By the end of the value engineering process, you will truly love your home, because it is uniquely designed for your life.

What is Rightsizing?

You’ve probably walked through a large house that just felt weird for some reason before. Homes that have no budget cap sometimes never go through rightsizing. Ironically, these homes can feel impersonal, or that the design just doesn’t make sense. When a home never goes through rightsizing, the homeowner never needs to address their values to decide what is truly important in their home.

A right-sized home is one where every space had to earn its place. Homes that are right sized fit the way you actually live, instead of some hypothetical future.

Rightsizing also makes your home more sustainable. A home tailored to your lifestyle consumes less energy, disturbs the homesite less, and uses less raw materials to build.

How Assembly Approaches Value Engineering

Because Assembly is a design-build firm, our design and construction teams work together from the very beginning. So your budget is taken into account by everyone from the start. As we design your home, we get to weigh choices with our builders, to know what it will actually cost you. This helps you make decisions during the design process. This can be less disorienting than seeing a huge number you didn’t expect after the first draft is finished.

 

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