What to Expect: The Design Meeting

The design meeting is an important part of the construction timeline when building on your lot with Wayne Homes.

Often referred to as your “color selection meeting” or “colors meeting,” your design meeting is when you meet with the Wayne Homes design team to select the finishes for the exterior and interior of your home. For many of our clients, this is really when things start to come together.

As part of our What to Expect series, we created a helpful design video detailing the process.

After working with the New Home Consultant to select a Wayne Homes floor plan and any customizations to the layout, there will be a color selection meeting, or the design meeting, to select all of the finishes for the new home.

Your Design Consultant will take you to the Design Center, which gives you a way to touch, feel, and see all of the available options when making selections. Many times, you will see something in person and decide it is not right for your home. Seeing the selections firsthand is a critical part of the selection process. Of course, if you don’t see what you want with our Included Features or additional options, we will find a custom solution. That’s the great thing about Wayne Homes–we can customize almost anything.

The color selection meeting typically takes at least 3-4 hours. You work together with your Design Consultant on all the selections, and we document everything so we have it for future reference. Even so, we encourage customers to take pictures of all of the selections during the meeting, so they can easily reference what they’ve chosen. Each Wayne home is unique which means that the items selected are unique for each home. The Design Consultant will help to explain which items need to be selected for the customer’s specific home.

• For the exterior, this would include items such as:
  • Siding (horizontal, shake, board and batten, etc.)
  • Stone and/or brick
  • Shingles
  • Porch posts
• For the interior, this would include items such as:
  • Flooring
  • Cabinets
  • Countertops
  • Interior doors
  • Trim
  • Plumbing fixtures
  • Lighting fixtures

A common question customers ask is if they should bring things with them to their meeting. The answer is yes! This can be incredibly helpful so that the Design Consultant has a better sense of the style of the customer and the goals they are hoping to accomplish with the design of their home. Customers may want to consider bringing Pinterest boards, photo examples, pillows, fabric samples, etc. – anything that they’d find useful and would like to reference to help describe their vision for the design of their new home.

Often customers are introduced to their Production Administrator at the color selection meeting. The Production Administrator coordinates the permitting process, determining your “dig date” (the date construction begins), the bank process, and more. The Production Administrator coordinates all of the pieces needed between the design meetings and the start of construction.

You will again meet with your Design Consultant on the day of your lot inspection and pre-construction meeting, which is typically held about 3-4 weeks after the color selection meeting. The pre-construction meeting is the final review and typically takes at least 3-5 hours.

The lot inspection takes place in the morning on the customer’s lot with the Field Manager. The lot inspection typically takes at least 2-3 hours at the lot and then travel time to get to the office for the pre-construction meeting.

The pre-construction meeting is the final review of your prints and selections. The Design Consultant will go through all of the selections made at the color selection meeting to confirm the selections and make any final changes needed. The pre-construction meeting is the final opportunity to make changes to the layout, design, and selections for the home.

The design process is a very exciting stage of your building timeline with Wayne Homes! It’s wonderful to see the ways customers put selections together to create the homes of their dreams. For most of the families we work with, they’ve been planning for and dreaming of their new homes for a long time, so they come in with amazing ideas. But, if you don’t–we’ve got lots of suggestions! It’s so wonderful to see it all come together during the design stage.

Do you have a design question for our team? Contact us!

About Wayne Homes

Wayne Homes is a custom homebuilder in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia (see all Model Home Centers). We offer more than 50 fully customizable floorplans and a team dedicated to providing the best experience in the home building industry. For more information, Ask Julie by Live Chat or call us at (866) 253-6807.

Disclaimer: The details of this blog are accurate as of the publish date, but are subject to change.