In our first episode of Home: The Second Story Podcast, we come together—three architects from different regions and backgrounds—to set the stage for the stories we're about to share. Taylor Davis from Birmingham, Alabama, is joined by Marilyn Moedinger from Boston and Lancaster, and Sheri Scott from Cincinnati. We each run our own architecture firms and bring decades of experience to the table, not just in design, but in guiding homeowners through the complex process of building or renovating a home.
We explain why we started this podcast: to offer a second perspective—the one that comes after the dust settles and the project is lived in. It's not about the flashy reveal. It’s about what homeowners learn once they’ve lived in their new or renovated space. These reflections, shared directly from homeowner to homeowner, can offer powerful insight that architects alone can’t always communicate.
Each of us shares our origin story—how we came to architecture and how our careers have evolved. From starting firms during economic downturns to buying churches on a whim for development, we've each taken unique paths. Despite differences in location and project type, our shared focus is residential architecture and a deep commitment to client-centered design. We discuss the emotional weight that home design carries—how homes are places of celebration, grief, growth, and memory—and why that makes our work feel deeply personal and significant.
We also talk about what architects really do. Many people don’t fully understand the value we bring: from guiding early project decisions, through design, contractor selection, permitting, and construction oversight. We’re not just drawing floor plans; we’re counselors, strategists, advocates, and collaborators. We help clients navigate tough decisions, balance budgets, and plan for the future. And often, we stay involved even after move-in.
Finally, we discuss the most important phase—the beginning. Many homeowners don’t know how to start a project or assemble the right team. We want to demystify that. Whether someone is building from scratch, renovating, downsizing, or aging in place, our goal is to help them start with clarity and confidence. Through this podcast, we hope to empower more people to approach their projects with intention and a sense of possibility.
Voiceover (00:03):
Everyone says how horrible it'll be to renovate or build your house. We're here to say, it doesn't have to be that way.
Join three seasoned architects as they interview homeowners who recently completed a large project and ask them one simple question: what do you know now that you wish you knew before you started? Welcome to Home: The Second Story Podcast.
Taylor Davis (00:26):
Welcome to Home: The Second Story. I'm Taylor Davis. I'm an architect here in Birmingham, Alabama. I have a small residential practice here, TPD Architecture and Design, and we do residential work and interiors. We're glad you're here.
Marilyn Moedinger (00:41):
My name is Marilyn Moedinger, and I'm the founding principal of Runcible Studios. We're based in Boston, Massachusetts and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Sheri Scott (00:50):
I am Sheri Scott, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I am founder and principal architect at Springhouse Architects.
When the three of us got together to collaborate on this podcast, we were brainstorming about what to call it, and Taylor landed on our name of Second Story. So, Taylor, will you tell us how you came up with that?
Taylor Davis (01:15):
Yeah, every now and then a big light bulb hits, and I think one of the things we really wanted to talk about in this podcast was not the conception of a project, not the initial execution of the project, but what comes next? How do homeowners feel after they've been in their homes for a little while? So, what's the second story? Not the first story that inspired them to do the project, but what comes next?
And so, Home: The Second Story is really about, for us, talking to homeowners, hearing their reflections on their experience, so that you can learn from those experiences too.
Sheri Scott (01:55):
And that was important to me because a lot of times when you talk to homeowners during the project, it's all very frenetic and kind of very high-highs and very low-lows during the process. So, after they've gotten in the home, they've spent a holiday there together and everything has kind of settled, that's what I'm interested in getting from them.
Marilyn Moedinger (02:20):
Yeah, I agree. I think the other part of it for me is that we've all experienced this where we might be telling folks things that we know from 20 years in the business, but it feels different when it's coming from someone with a similar experience level.
So, homeowner to homeowner conversation is very powerful, and every time I talk with my clients who've been in their home for a year or so and I say, “I wish I could connect the knowledge and wisdom that you're sharing with my new clients so that they could hear from you — what if I just sent you out for dinner with new clients and you guys could all talk and share lessons,” and that's what we're here doing in this podcast.
Taylor Davis (03:10):
Some nice little dinners between our clients.
Marilyn Moedinger (03:13):
That's right, that's right. So, I think that's why we wanted to do this. I think it would be interesting for us to explain who we are and why anyone should listen to us. Our goal is to have people listen to other homeowners, but also, we've been around the block a few times as well.
And so, Sheri, why don't you go first and tell us a little bit about your background?
Sheri Scott (03:38):
I started Springhouse Architects 16 years ago during 2008 when the big recession happened in housing. The architecture firm I worked for could no longer pay me (laughs), so I said, well, I'll go out on my own then because I'm not making any money anyway.
I went out on my own, it grew very slowly from there. I was raising three little boys at the time that are grown men now, but it afforded me that flexibility to be home for them, but still be able to be a professional woman and stay in the industry.
Growing from there, I think my business has grown slowly every single year. Now, we're up to a team of eight people. We focus on high-end residential, ground up construction, and that's not all that we do. I recently merged with a guy from Cincinnati, another registered architect, and when we merged, we became more capable of doing commercial work. So, we've kind of merged more into commercial, also.
My own focus will always be residential. It is my passion, it's what I'm good at, it's what I feel really confident leading people through that process, having done it literally for 30 years, I've been in the residential architecture field.
I've also done other things. I tend to have more than one thing going on at a time, which sometimes to my own detriment. But we did for a short stint start building our own projects. I learned slower than I wanted to. I learned that that is not my talent, and it is not for me. But I learned a lot from that process. I learned a lot from being the builder, and what it really did was reinforced my belief that homeowner, architect, builder is the right triangle to be in.
We were performing building as design build, and it always sounds great at the time, but really, to have that triangle and the back and forth and being able to check each other, that's really a great process, and that taught me why that's important, and that that's the way I want to continue on in my business.
The other thing I'm doing now is jumping into development, which I think that is for me (laughs). It is sometimes trial and error, running a small business.
So, on a whim, about a year and a half ago, there was a church, a big 14,000 square foot church in downtown Cincinnati that was up for auction, and I bid on it, and I won it without having any idea what I was going to do with it.
But I knew that I wanted to be in Cincinnati, I knew I wanted to be downtown. It seemed like the right time for it, and it's a very long story where we are right now in that process, but drinking from a fire hose, learning the development process, and I love it. It is hard. I have a lot to learn, but I love it.
So, that's where I am in my professional journey. I will say I love my job. Maybe not every single day or every single minute of every day, but I love it. I love being an architect, I love leading people through these projects, and I've gotten to meet two of my best friends through this profession.
So, Marilyn, would you like to tell us where you came from?
Marilyn Moedinger (07:46):
Sure. I'm going to start at the very beginning. I was born on a farm and grew up on a farm. Ever since I was a little girl, I would get these plan books from the grocery store and I would open them up and get out a little pot of white out, white out all of the walls, and redraw them where I thought they should be.
Pretty soon someone realized that that was actually a job that I could have … someone explained to me that that's a job that you could have, and I was beside myself, “What do you mean? I can go to school and learn this, and I can do this as my job?”
So, I went to architecture school. After architecture school, I actually went into contracting. So, I was a construction laborer, started at the very bottom, and worked my way up. I was an estimator and then a project manager. So, I have years of experience on the contractor side.
So, that experience is super useful for my clients. It's really fun additional color I can add to stories and to serve my clients and also to work with contractors in a really collaborative way. But I wasn't destined to be a contractor forever, so I went back to school and got my master's in architecture.
I moved to Boston, there was a recession, there were no jobs. I got sort of half a job offer in Boston, so I sold my car so I could pay the movers and moved to Boston. There, I started teaching. So, I've been an adjunct professor for about 12 years, and I started working at a firm in Boston focused on multifamily projects. A couple little things here and there, this happened, this happened, and I kind of started my business by accident actually.
So, I had left a place I was working, I was actually in academia full-time, love the students, love teaching, do not love being an academic administrator. I want to be out in the field building and making things. So, I left that and didn't really have a plan. I finished my exams, became an official architect, and then people started to say, “Hey, I hear you're kind of free, can you help out with this project and this project?”
About six months later, I had a full book of work, and I realized I should get some insurance and maybe a website and like a business card. So, that was 10 and a half years ago. So, ever since then, Runcible Studios has been up and operating, and that was all in the Boston area.
A couple of years ago, I made the shift. Like so many other folks had some COVID decisions, COVID era decisions. I wanted to move back to the farm where it all started. I renovated a home here on my family's farm and have opened up an office here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So, I'm back and forth between both places. My team is mostly in Boston, but we're growing in Lancaster.
Along the way, we've come to specialize in high-end, super intricate, tricky renovations. There's a lot of historic buildings in Boston that need to be renovated, so we work on those. We do additions and ground up as well. We do multifamily work for developers, mixed use kind of thing. And we do what I call quirky commercial and industrial work.
So, our latest was we converted a church (hi Sheri) into a school for acrobats. So, really interesting weirdo projects like that, that's where you'll find us. And I also am getting into development. So, I've been buying real estate and operating real estate for the last 10 years and also just recently bought a building in Lancaster, a commercial building. So, lots of adventures to be had.
So, I figure I've been a contractor, I've been an architect, I've taught architects, I own buildings, I've renovated buildings. Now, I got to build my own from scratch. So, that's the last step. So, I love being able to bring all of this knowledge of the process from A to Z, from all these different angles to help my clients, and now, to help everyone here on this podcast.
How about you Taylor?
Taylor Davis (12:01):
So, I grew up in a family where architecture was kind of just sort of the norm. My dad's an architect here in Birmingham. I used to go play with the mechanical eraser in the office and put the laminate samples and make necklaces out of them and put the wallpaper samples in my dollhouse.
And then I went to architecture school, and having grown up in the field, I was a little frustrated by the fact that there were no clients in architecture school. They were all kind of made up. There weren't any parameters, it was sort of big ideas, but not a whole lot of grounding, and that just didn't feel like what I knew architecture to be.
My experience had been about the clients, it had been about the people that my dad had worked with and for and around and that team, and that sort of was not part of the conversation when I was in school. It was really frustrating.
I kept at it, moved to New York. I worked in New York for a big firm there for about six years, primarily doing historic preservation and urban design, some retail work, a little bit of residential, but not much.
Actually, the project that I was on when I left the firm was the mall for the (World) Trade Center, underneath the (World) Trade Center. So, we were the retail consultants for the mall. And I left in February of that year when our first child was born. And after September 11th, things changed for a lot of people. It was kind of another one of those COVID sort of landmark points in time where things are one way before and a very different way afterwards.
We moved to the suburbs of New Jersey and I started doing residential work out of my basement with an infant and then a toddler and then pregnant again, and then being fed up with the winter and being at my heart, an Alabama born and bred person, I convinced my New Jersey husband to move back to Alabama, and I started a firm here pretty soon after that kind of working out of my basement (it's sort of the slowest startup in history).
And really have focused primarily on client work, on real client work. And most of the time, that means we are doing a lot of handholding, we're doing some marriage counseling, we're doing some predictive, “Your kids are going to go through this next phase, you're going to need this number of parking places for the teenagers.”
So, it's a lot of conversation in addition to the design work, and that's what I found fascinating. And I think what I found so frustrating about architecture school is that conversation with the clients wasn't ever happening. I really thrive on that.
So, we now do full service architectural design for renovations, but also for new construction. And that means we're doing the interiors, and you can see our interiors library beginning behind us, and have recently started working on doing work for older adults.
So, aging in place, and both of us here in the office are certified aging in place specialists, but diving into senior living and kind of what does that transition look like? How does single family living sort of overlap with senior living? How do we make spaces that people feel comfortable downsizing into that look like their homes, that are familiar in locations that they know?
So, one of the things that I'm excited about in this podcast is because it's super client-centered, it's homeowner centered. It's about these conversations that we've been having with our clients for all this time, but now, we get to share with other people who might be eager to learn some of the same lessons that we've learned.
Because I know for me and for both of you, as we've had these conversations through the years, our conversations are what inform our design process. We don't come at it with a preconceived notion of what a house is going to look like or what a renovation is going to look like or what an addition is going to look like.
It comes about through our long, lengthy conversations and reiterations of design that we come to over these conversations and with these relationships that we build with our clients. And so, having the opportunity to share a little bit behind the scenes of those interactions so that people kind of understand how our designs come about, that we're not handing them a pattern book of stuff that we've done before.
That's really something that appeals to me very much about what I do, and what gets me fired up about coming into the office, is being able to see our clients who are now friends. And I know y'all feel the same way.
Marilyn Moedinger (16:49):
Taylor, I agree a hundred percent. And I think what you're describing is the collaboration that happens between architect and client, or architect and homeowner when they are equally part of the design process.
We can't do it without them. We can't do it without understanding what they want, what they need. They don't have to come to us with solutions, they just have to come to us with desires or dreams or ideas or-
Taylor Davis (17:19):
Or problems to solve.
Marilyn Moedinger (17:20):
Problems to solve, we're good at that. I think that's something that we want to highlight as we're moving through these conversations with homeowners, is what that collaborative process feels like. There's such this idea that it's going to be difficult, but if you've got people around you who’ve walked through the process hundreds of times, we are able to help draw people out and draw people through that process.
And I am excited for us to share our knowledge about that, but also excited for our folks who are going to join us, our guests to tell others, “Hey, it's alright, this is how this process really works.” This isn't just when you Google it or when you watch HGTV or see these things, this is how it really works, and this is how it could be awesome.”
So, it's that collaborative piece I think that people don't really understand until they've gone through it.
Sheri Scott (18:16):
One thing that I love about the three of us being together is that our practices are so different, but what we do have in common is we all deal with residential clients. And in that, I have always loved residential work because it's very personal.
It is us designing a home for our clients, for them to live with their families, for them to celebrate things, to mourn things — every single thing that happens will happen in the context of their home. And that's very important to me in what I do in architecture.
And through this podcast, I think that we have a chance to help the homeowners understand where to start in this process. I believe that where they start is going to be the most important thing that sets up the entire process for them.
And if we can explain things, have guests come on and tell them their story of the process, the things that were pitfalls and the things that were great and strong and happy, then we're going to help people get started off on the right foot.
One of my motivations for doing this podcast really is to help people understand where they should start. I have homeowners come to me all the time sitting across the table, they come to me from different sources: realtors, builders, recommendations like Google searches — there's so many different ways to find how to start in this process.
And if I can stop everyone from walking into a model home and saying, “Oh, this is a really pretty house and builder guy, you seem really nice. So, let's spend the next two years and spend $2 million together” on a whim — so, if we can (chuckles) get people past that, I feel like this would be a total success.
Taylor Davis (20:27):
Sheri, I think you hit the nail on the head, that the starting point for everybody is the most critical piece, and that's also the one that's the most confusing to people because people don't know where to begin.
I mean, we've talked about this, the hand-waving, they walk through their house and they're like, “Over here, we could do this, and over here we could do this.” And I tell my clients that all the time. They'll call me and I'll say, “Oh, you're in the walking around your house, waving your hands in the air phase.” They say, “How do you know?’ And I’m like, “Well, you're not the first.”
That beginning point: who do I call? How do I assemble a team? How do I put together the right group of people, whether that's architects, designers, builders, but also like bankers and financing people and realtors to get real estate assessments so that you know if you're overbuilding for a property or surveyors, or whoever that team needs to be to get you to the starting line, because there's a lot of stuff that happens in preparations before the gate goes up.
And I think that's a really critical piece of information that we can help you figure out as you are going through this process, who needs to be on the team? How do I get started? How do I get past this?
Marilyn Moedinger (21:50):
Sheri, something that I've heard you say before to add onto what Taylor just said, is how do we proceed through the process with intention? How do we make sure that it doesn't feel like flailing your hands around like you're saying Taylor, or that you're sort of just Googling to stay one step ahead of a process that you don't understand; how do you move with intention?
This is one of the biggest things that a family can go through is to renovate a home or build a home. It's totally disruptive to life and you got to move out, and what about which school district are we in and all these things, and who is there to usher you through that and walk you through the steps, and be there when you just need to talk about the overall logistics of what you're up to.
Conversations I've had with my clients over the years have been everything from, “How can we help you find a home in the school district that you need to be in because we've totally torn up your home and you need a place to stay for a year?” Talking about that, talking about how do we set up this process so that it works?
Turns out people have jobs. You can't just stop what you're doing and dedicate all of your free time to designing your home with your architect. You've got kids and family and jobs and life and everything's happening. So, how do we as architects set up a process that takes the real-world considerations of people into account?
So, there's also a sense of letting things unfold. So, while you want to proceed with intention, you also want to allow the process to unfold. There are things that you might discover along the way that if you just sort of blow through them, you're not going to let those things emerge. We're here to help that process as well.
Our ears are tuned to hear when someone isn't quite sure about a decision or isn't quite sure about how to make a decision, or is feeling a little bit of tension (one partner feels this way, the other partner feels that way). Our ears are tuned to hear that. and we're ready to help people through that. That doesn't scare us, we actually love it. We love that process of helping work through those things.
And I think that this leads to something else I know we're all passionate about, which is helping people understand what architects actually do, because I think it's pretty mysterious to a lot of folks. What do we do, actually? We draw stuff on paper, everybody knows that — but do we? There's so many more things that we do, and I know that's been a central part of many of our conversations.
And Sheri, to your point earlier, we all, while our businesses and our projects are different, because we're in different regions, we have different sort of business models, there's a lot of commonality. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about a description of what architects do from your perspective.
Sheri Scott (25:00):
Yeah, thanks, Marilyn, that's a loaded question (laughs). What do we do and why are we so expensive? Right?
Marilyn Moedinger (25:07):
Oh, talk about a loaded question.
[Laughter]
Sheri Scott (25:08):
Yes, yes. I feel very strongly that we are guides to people through this entire process. Yes, we designed the house from your inspiration. Like Taylor said earlier, we don't have a book of plans, we're not delivering a product to you. We are truly serving you and guiding you through this whole process.
One of the motivations for doing this podcast is that I want to learn from people that have been through this process. As much as we want to share this information with other people that are interested in going through the process, I want to learn from people that either have had an architect that maybe it went great, maybe it didn't go so great, and we, in our professional journeys can learn from them to see how we can serve our clients better, because I know the three of us are always trying to be better and to serve better in our professional capacity.
Another thing that I am interested to find, and one of my motivations for doing this, is to find out the leaping off point, the catalyst. For most of my clients, the homeowners, there is something that happened in their life, and now, they are ready, they're ready right now to be in a new house that they love, and it's different for everybody.
For some people, it's their ego. One of my current clients right now, he came to me, he just went through a divorce and he's like, “I want the biggest, baddest house that's out in the open. I want everybody to see it.” And he is so excited to design this house and to build it, and he is a hundred percent, “Like Sheri, that's my ego talking and I'm going to go for it,” which I love.
Most of my clients are more like legacy people where they come in and they want to create a home for their family to either raise their family or to bring kids back into, to have a family home that kids will come back to.
And then the catalyst for each of those different scenarios is something different. Either people have finally hit a professional goal, or they've saved enough money, or they have a life change. Kids have all left, we have empty nesters to design for. In Taylor's world, maybe they're looking at aging in place and they want to design their last home, which that's a huge responsibility that Taylor takes on.
So, I am eager to hear all of those stories from different perspectives, and I hope that we get to talk to people that have done huge custom homes that are big price tags, but I also want to talk to people that do production builds. I want to talk to people that are in a small neighborhood or have done renovations or additions. I want all the different perspectives because we tend to get niched in so far that we don't know the other perspectives.
Taylor Davis (28:33):
Sheri, I think you said something else that struck me, which is that everybody's got these different catalysts for why they're doing this, for why they're getting involved in this. And I think learning from those catalysts is also sort of understanding whether that was the right catalyst, whether that motivation was actually the best motivation, and how did that steer their project positively or negatively.
I think that there's a lot that we can learn from folks and that people can learn from each other about we did this … I hear a lot when I talk to my clients, “It was shortsighted that I did this way. I should have gone ahead and invested in X.”
For example, I'm sure the conversation we hear a lot is that, “I want to phase this because construction costs are going to come down.” They never come down; construction costs never go down. They never come down. It's just a word, just put that out there. It will never get any cheaper than it is to build probably right now (maybe a little bit, but really not that much).
What can we learn from their mistakes, from their shortsightedness, from their inspiration, from their lack of inspiration? And I think the three of us, sometimes we can hear the same conversation over and over again within our own client circles and the people that we talk to — what I'm really excited to do is get out of my own little Alabama box and hear from people who are dealing in different contexts.
Whether that's Boston winters, which is something we don't have to deal with; whether that's wide-open tracts of property, which is all something we don't have to deal with very often. So, what are the other kind of contexts where the people that we're talking to are coming from and what their inspiration led them to? So, for me, it's also about getting out of my own little box.
Marilyn Moedinger (30:30):
So, a lot of folks don't actually even know what an architect does, and I think part of what we're up to on this podcast and what we want to help you do is understand what we do and how that can help you and your projects.
So, architects, let's just say it out loud, have the reputation of being expensive or getting in the way. Your builder might say, “We don't need an architect. My buddy's friend’s wife, sister’s uncle’s, cousin’s girlfriend can do your layout for you, you don't need all that.”
The way I answer that question, and I know Sheri and Taylor pretty much are in agreement with this, is the work still has to be done, the work of design still has to be done. Whether your builder does it or your uncle's friend’s whatever does it, somebody has to do it. And why wouldn't you pay a person who has the expertise in it? Your builder may say, “It's included,” but they're going to charge you more for the time that they are taking to do that.”
As architects, what we do is we have roles at every part of the process, and I just want to run through them very quickly here.
At the very beginning, we are helping people define the project even before they have a project or even before they know what they want to do. We are talking with folks who are saying, “Should I stay in my house and renovate, or should I buy a new place? Should I buy a plot of land and build something new? Should I downsize or should I put an addition on the back because I want my kids to come visit? How do I do those things?”
We are routinely walking through this with our clients, whether it's doing zoning analysis, building analysis, structural analysis, design analysis to understand what the possibilities are for you in your existing home versus what might be possible in other places. So, that's the first thing.
The next thing we do is once the project is defined, let's say in my world, in Boston, it's usually a renovation of an existing house, we say, “Alright, we're going to stay here and renovate.” Well, what's the first thing we got to do? Well, let's come up with some design ideas.
When we're working through those design ideas, this isn't just us closing our eyes and talking about vision and all that. We are thinking about structure, code, zoning, costs. We are thinking about cost-
Taylor Davis (32:57):
Water, we're thinking about water.
Marilyn Moedinger (33:00):
We're thinking about water (laughter), we're thinking about utilities, we're thinking about snow, we're thinking about all the practical stuff, as well as getting to know you and finding out what matters to you, and how we can take all that practical stuff that we can’t avoid, and all the beautiful, awesome stories that we want to make possible in your home happen in the same place, while also keeping to your budget. That's a lot, that's a lot of stuff, and we are trained to do all that.
Once we do that, then we start to help you find a contractor. Contractors, they have a wide range of abilities (chuckles), and a good architect will have a stable of contractors that they continuously work with. So, I've got a bunch of guys who I am always working with. So, I might say, “For this project, I feel like these three guys might be a good fit. Let's talk to them.”
I'm vetted; they're vetted. My clients are super happy because they're not just Googling how to find a contractor. They are able to use folks that I've worked with over and over and that I have relationships with. So, we help you find a contractor, then we do the whole design. So, usually, I'm helping find a contractor and then we get into the whole design.
For us at Runcible, that means picking absolutely everything. So, we are coordinating the structural design, coordinating the HVAC design, picking out the faucets, picking out paint colors, all of that with the owner. We're coordinating all sorts of engineering, the foundation and the roof and absolutely everything. Everything goes into that set of drawings.
When all that's done and the contractor has, and it's time to build, I guess we're done, right? Architects leave the scene — no, they do not! Here comes one of our most important roles, which is construction contract administration, or sticking around during construction to keep things on the rails.
What that means is in a renovation, everyone knows the dreaded story: “Oh, I've opened a wall, there's all these surprises, what do I do?” Instead of the contractor calling you every night with 17 questions, they're calling me all day. So, I might have 99 questions a week that I get from the contractor, and I can answer 98 of them, and I bring my clients one, and I say, “Here's what I need help with, and here are three solutions that we can work through.”
My clients are busy people with families and lives and jobs and everything, and they don't have time to answer the contractor calling them every four minutes. That's what I'm there to do, and I can solve it and bring them one or two questions a week and have them be part of the process in a fun, coordinated, as stress-free way as possible.
And then we're done then when construction's done — no, we're still part of the process even after that! Anytime you might want to do something extra on the house, we're there. We already know the house. We can help you figure out the addition or the backyard or other things like that. But I think the point here is that we're involved much earlier in the process, through much more on the process than most people realize. And the value there is immense.
I can pay for my fee with one single good catch during construction. So, if I have saved one thing during construction, my entire fee is paid for, and that happens on every single project. And it's not just that I save that one thing and you save the money, you also got this amazing design and all this coordination and a built-in counselor all in one for the low-low price of….!
So, I'll just mention that architecture is usually priced by a percentage of the cost of construction. We'll go into all of that in detail as the podcast unfolds. But yeah, we are all transparent about our pricing and we want to be upfront about what that kind of effort costs, and the value that you're getting for every dollar that you're putting in.
Sheri Scott (37:10):
Yeah, that's great, Marilyn. And to kind of follow up on that of how we serve clients, people are coming to us, and they don't come to this project on their very first thought of, “Oh, we're going to build a house, and we go and put our team together.” They think about this for a very long time.
And sometimes it is watching HGTV and the extreme of everything's perfect and you go away for a week and you come home and a big reveal, right? Move the billboard or whatever they do, and it's all done and everybody loves it, and it's all in budget and on time, and all of the entertainment side of it.
And then the opposite, the low extreme that people also experience is talking to other people that have been through the process. And typically, when you get stories of people that have been through the process, it's always the horror story. It's always very close to, “my building fell down and I lost all my money.”
And in truth, most projects are somewhere in the middle. And then I hope that we can help homeowners that are working through this, that you can discern the highs from the lows, and maybe meet your project in the middle by learning the experiences from the stories that we get from people here.
Taylor Davis (38:41 ):
Ladies, thank you for the conversation this afternoon. As always, it's enlightening.
And we hope you'll join us for upcoming episodes where we can talk some more about these things that we feel like are really important to you as homeowners.
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