You and your wife decide to take the big
leap, hire an architect, and build a new
house. You're already envisioning your first
meal there and all the great family
occasions and parties you'll have. You're
most certainly not thinking about all the
decisions large and small, from floorplan to
door knobs and roof shingles, that you will
have to make before the first shovel goes
into the ground.
Indeed, the decision-making aspect of
building a new home comes as a shock to most
people. With every other purchase they have
ever made, the product was already
manufactured. The only decision to be made
was which one they liked best. With a
custom-built house, the opposite is true.
You start with a clean slate and you decide
everything.
In fact, for the first six months of a
custom home-building project, that's all
you'll be doing, but Washington, D.C.,
couples therapist Tybe Diamond says that
many couples do not do this well.
The problem is not indecision; it's how
the couple makes decisions, Diamond said.
With a project as big as a new house, each
person will have strong feelings about the
choices. There will be many disagreements,
but many couples do not feel safe arguing
with their partners. As Diamond put it,
"They are afraid to be authentic and risk
hurting their partner's feelings or
incurring their partner's potentially
negative judgments. But to resolve conflicts
and work together for a solution, each
partner needs to feel safe in airing their
position, no matter what it is."
Consider this scenario, Diamond said.
Your wife's favorite color is magenta, and
that's the color she wants for the living
room walls. Every time she wears something
with this color, you tell her she looks
great. If you nix her paint choice you look
like a hypocrite and she will be hurt.
But, if you feel safe, you can tell her
straight off that your knee-jerk reaction is
"no," and know that together you can figure
out why this might be so. If there's a
strong comfort zone, you can tease out an
explanation that might be something like
this: "I love magenta on you. When you wear
it, I feel like there's a lovely bright spot
of color in my life. But when an entire room
is lit up that way I know I will be
overwhelmed." With this degree of candor,
most spouses could reach a compromise,
Diamond said.
An "established safety zone" for
disagreement is especially important when
the house the couple wants to build is their
first house. It will bring differing life
experiences and core values to the surface
in ways both partners may not expect. You're
not just building a new house, you're
creating your first "home," and this will
resonate very differently for each partner,
Diamond said. Your knee-jerk negative to
"elegant in-town living" is not necessarily
intransigence. Your resistance might be "in
your bones" because you grew up in a very
informal household with a "comfortable"
lifestyle. Its lived-in look included
non-matching living room sets, a
hand-me-down dining room table, and a
liberal sprinkling of toys, books, baseball
mitts and the morning paper. To reach an
agreement on what kind of house will work
for you two, you need to be able to say,
"I'm not sure why I don't want this,"
without your wife characterizing your
position as "stupid, silly and wrong for
these 50 reasons."
An "established safety zone" also allows
each partner to feel comfortable in saying
that certain items are not negotiable.
There's no place to meet in the middle,
"just like there's no one-and-a-half
children," Diamond said. You may want a
skylight in the kitchen because you think
the soft, indirect light that it casts is
the perfect way to start your day. You feel
so strongly about this that no skylight
means you'll resent the kitchen every day
that you live in the house. An honest
discussion allows you to admit you're not
being rational here. It also allows your
wife the same privilege and your
acquiescence on the big, fancy bathtub with
the whirlpool jets that you know she'll only
use three times.
Sometimes the difficulty in making
decisions for a new house stems from a
difference in perception, Diamond said. You
might be focused on the price tag while your
spouse is fixated on the look. She insists
on paying hundreds of extra dollars just to
get a refrigerator that lines up with the
counters. A less expensive model cools just
as well and holds just as much food, but it
projects 6 inches into the kitchen space.
You think this distinction is ridiculous --
it feels like spending more to get less food
in a swanky restaurant. A frank discussion
could explain her thinking. For example, it
might be that with her frantic and demanding
professional life, she wants a sense of
order at home, and the crisp, clean look of
a kitchen with the higher-priced
refrigerator helps to produce it.
New-home decision making can be skewed
when one of the spouses is an artist or an
architect. The professional expects
deference. "She can give 100 reasons for why
you should want a particular tile, and
what's more, she has expertise!" Diamond
said. But you may have some artistic
training and opinions and want to have some
say in the choices to be made. With a safe
zone, not only can you tell her that, you
can also remind her that you are building a
home together, not a competition entry.
Diamond said that couples can also get
into trouble when they make decisions by
"looking at the label and not the contents."
With a new house project, this can play out
in how a couple picks an architect.
With the frantic pace of modern life,
everyone is in a time crunch, and it's easy
to be swayed by credentials and not use
common sense. A couple can decide that an
architect looks good simply because he's a
graduate of the best architecture school in
the United States and he did so and so's
house. But Diamond said the couple would be
doing themselves a great favor if they
canned these assumptions and asked so and so
what he/she thought about the star architect
after the job was finished. The couple might
discover that so and so found his
personality grating. This is an important
consideration in residential work because
you will be working very closely with the
architect for 18 months or longer,
discussing your personal values and making
decisions about how you will live. So and so
might complain that the star architect's
original design went over the budget by 30
percent. You also have to remember, Diamond
said, that what worked really well for so
and so might not work for you. You should
rely on your own judgment, meet the
architect, look at several finished
projects, talk to other owners who have
worked with this person and then make your
own informed decision.
An aspect of decision making that is
specific to building a new house can derail
some couples, Diamond said. The enormity of
the unknowns can be overwhelming -- you are
spending hundreds of thousands of dollars
before you'll see the end result. If this is
causing high anxiety and sleepless nights,
her advice is to recognize your limitations,
buy a house that is already built, and
channel your home-building inclinations into
a kitchen remodel.
