In this first episode of DIY's Home IQ you'll meet the owners of the home that DIY filmed being built from the ground up. Over the next several weeks, you'll find out how to make the dream of building your own home come true!DIY sent a camera crew to the suburbs of Pittsburgh to document the building of a 4,000 square foot custom home, and you'll have the opportunity to watch the process from selecting the plans and choosing a contractor to moving in.
As you'll find out, there's nothing easy about building a home, and at times the process can be chaotic. Let's get started by meeting the homeowners.Lynn and Brad Oberg (figure A), college sweethearts and married for more than 20 years, are no strangers to home construction. Brad is an architect and Lynn is a costume designer, and they have two daughters, one in college and one a senior in high school. For years the Obergs lived with the possibility that Brad's company would transfer him, so their houses were always decorated with "resale" in mind.
"This is really the first house we could have a lot of fun with, " Lynn says. "And kind of go a little bit bolder with our color choices and our surface choices." With Lynn's costume-design business, she also needed lots of room for storage, so does her husband, who is also a theatrical set designer. Storage was a key factor during the planning of this new home.
Brad and Lynn did all the decorating of the new home, along with tiling their backsplash (figure B), lay the brick for the driveway and even build the walls in the basement themselves. "We're sort of the do-it-yourself type people," Brad says. "We don't tend to go to decorators and outside resources. We like to make those decisions and learn about the products and learn about the environment ourselves."
DIY's mission is to follow the Obergs as they make these decisions, and you'll see every step of the process.
For more information on Home IQ, check out our online package that features special content on raising your home IQ. Click here for show information, slide shows, videos, step-by-step content and more!
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