From the homeowner’s perspective the project budgeting task primarily is one of identifying and making decisions on trade-offs.  In new home construction and large addition/renovation projects, the starting point is gathering input from the homeowner’s family about its requirements.  These are inputs about the family’s lifestyle, space uses and needs, special living requirements and other desirable house features that become the basis of the home's design. This is a very important stage of the design process and most designers spend a significant amount of time on gathering and codifying the owner inputs. Timberdale has developed highly effective tools to facilitate this information flow.

After the requirements are translated into a building program, conceptual design and initial schematic drawings, the design/build team can begin to formulate preliminary budget estimates.  At this stage, the focus of the homeowner’s budget trade-off choices is largely around the building's size and shape.  As the design process advances and the drawings and specifications become more detailed, the budget trade-off discussion focuses more on the type and quality of the building’s features. 

The Trade-off Triangle is a visual tool to aid the homeowner when tasked in making a decision on whether or not to include a specific design feature in his/her house by placing the trade-off within the context of the overall design/budget decision-making landscape.  It is useful to be reminded that at the budget margin, a specific design decision must be paid for, either with additional dollars added to the investment or by modifying/eliminating features previously designed into the house.  Since large projects contain a myriad of details and therefore possibilities to trade-off against, the problem is simplified somewhat by focusing the homeowner on the major levers available to him/her.  These levers are summarized in the Trade-off Triangle diagram below:

Using a Trade-off Triangle as a visual aid in understanding the major levers in managing a project is not a new concept.  The idea has been used extensively in IT circles for software development projects.  In that context, the three dimensions of the triangle are “budget,” “features” and “time.”  This is really an elaboration of the old euphemism:  “Good, fast, cheap – pick two.”

Architects and homebuilders have adapted this model to focus the discussion on the budget dimension and two others that are feature subsets – building quality and building size. This is a more meaningful partition of the topics that tend to dominate the trade-off discussions that occur during the design phase of the project.  Although the time dimension is important, for a home building project of a given general size and complexity the standard amount of time required to complete the project seems to be well understood and/or easily verified, within bounds.

Over a series of five Blogs, I intend to elaborate on the Trade-off Triangle as a vehicle to communicate the nature of the trade-offs and decisions that home owners should anticipate when entering the design and budgeting process.  I believe that this perspective is helpful by providing a model for home building project budget decision making.