Matching My Family's Lifestyle
To the Design of Our Home

Editor's Note: This is the sixth installment of "Teardown Diary," a feature by Wall Street Journal correspondent Nancy Keates. The column details her decision to demolish the Portland, Ore., home where she lives with her family and build anew. In the months ahead, she will chronicle what led to the decision, the financial costs, hiring an architect, knocking down her house, choosing the features of her new home and the final product.

According to the American Institute of Architects, there are five phases of design. The first is "Originate" -- which involves discussing and exploring the idea of the project and how to use an architect.

We have come to the end of the second phase, called "Focus": Refining a vision for the project. "Your architect leads you through a 'programming' exercise to help you explore the needs of those who will live, work or play in the space you create," says the AIA Web site.

For clients of our architect, Dave Giulietti of firm Giulietti Schouten of Portland, Ore., that exercise includes a questionnaire that arrives via email just before we go on a week's vacation. It starts out by asking about our reasons and goals. Readers of my previous columns know why we have started this adventure -- a horrendous floor plan, not enough room, heating issues, and so on.

Next I am to describe in as much detail as possible our "existing lifestyle and anticipated future goals or desired lifestyle." That means our work schedule, habits and hobbies. As I do this, I realize what a helpful exercise it is for the design process.

Every morning without fail -- and no matter what time he goes to bed the night before -- our almost-7-year-old son Vaughan gets up at 6 a.m. Using the bathroom, he inadvertently (or not) wakes up his brother Teddy, 5, who, depending on how much sleep he got the night before, can then become very cranky.

The clomping of the kids comingdown the stairs wakes us up minutes later, since our bedroom is on the ground floor in between the stairs and the rest of the house. We have breakfast, and the kids are off to school at 7:20.

I work most of the day alone in the house's cramped, cold entryway. The boys arrive home and do homework, watch "Tom & Jerry," color or play with Legos; occasionally they make messy projects that get tape, staples, paper and glue everywhere. There's almost always a wild chase or two around the kitchen while I am cooking.

We eat dinner at the small round table in the family room that's squished in a corner. We'd prefer the dining table, but there's usually an ongoing Monopoly game at one end and my husband's work piled on the other. After dinner, the kids like to do more messy projects with Dave. They go to bed. We go to bed. A couple times a week Dave gets middle-of-the-night pages and/or phone calls that send him to work at the hospital.

Wouldn't it be great to have a room just for projects so the house is less messy? An office for Dave would allow us to eat on the dining room table. And a family room big enough for a table would be great for those never-ending games of Monopoly.

Our sleep problems could also be solved: If Vaughan's room was away from Teddy's and the bathroom was across the hall near the stairs, maybe Vaughan could wake up and get downstairs without waking up Teddy. If Dave could go from our room to the bathroom, to a walk-in closet that leads to his office and then out his office door down the stairs, maybe I could go back to sleep more quickly after he gets paged. I can't think of a design solution for getting him to work less -- but maybe if he had his own space here, he might do more at home.

The questionnaire takes a more taxing turn, when in a section called "Spatial Elements," it asks for an explanation, in as much detail as possible, of my perception of the rooms we want. "Try to use descriptive adjectives to express the feeling of the spaces you desire, rather than describing a physical appearance," it says. It provides some examples: "warm, romantic, open, secluded, inviting and functional."

Suddenly, I am spending late nights searching for choice words that will accurately define this imprecise vision. I panic and Google stories in home sections of newspapers for help. Finally, I settle on words like uncluttered, light, spacious, clean, colorful, inviting and warm, a mix of new and old, and authentic. Definitely not romantic -- that sounds like a kitschy B&B.

The last section asks for a description of each room in terms of specific requirements, "qualitative as well as quantitative," including a list of furnishings and equipment requirements. The example it gives is for the dining room: "I would like to serve dinner for four people with capability of serving eight. The room should have a view of the outdoors. It should be located near the kitchen, but I do not want visual contact with the food preparation area. It should have space for my antique cabinet, and my original Picasso should be in view. I would like built-in speakers for music while I dine."

That sounds good, so I copy most of it down (not the original Picasso part, of course). I even go so far as to describe the broom closet: "Room for vacuum, brooms, cleaning supplies, big mop and bucket -- and an efficient way to store all that."

The next phase, according to the AIA, is "Design." Then "Build" and then, finally, "Occupy." Oh to occupy!

Join a reader discussion on the Teardown Diary discussion board.

-- Nancy Keates is a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and lives in Portland, Ore.

Email your comments to teardowndiary@dowjones.com.