THE KSN DREAM HOUSE FOR THE CURE

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Designing a dream house

An explanation from Cherie Nies-Cowgill of Nies Homes

by Leon Smitherman
KSN News

WICHITA, Kansas -- How do you design a dream house? First of all, you get the best home builders around to show you how it's done. That's exactly what we did for the KSN Dream House for the Cure.

When you look around a beautiful model home, it all seems perfect. There are literally hundreds of ways you can design a home, but with today's technology, the possibilities are endless.

A mouse, a keyboard, a big screen TV -- these are the tools it takes to build a house. Okay, maybe that's stretching it a bit but before the first nail is hammered into place on a custom home, that home is laid out exactly like the customer wants on a computer.

Cherie Nies-Cowgill, vice-president of Nies Homes shows us how it's done.

"They come in and they say 'I want these bedrooms to be bigger', so I'll pick this up, grab this side of the house and we'll move that out," said Cherie.

There is no more sketching out a rough design on a cocktail napkin, no pencils, no erasers -- in the competitive custom home market, the builders goal is to give the customer exactly what they want, and when your working with a virtual blueprint you can do virtually anything.

"Say I want a wine cabinet. Basically what I would do is figure out where we would put it then in notes. We add in a wine cabinet and it shows up right here. Wine cabinet."

Okay, a wine cabinet is easy. It's a glorified closet, right? Lets try knocking down some walls and really get creative.

"So you're telling me that I would really like some kind of indoor, outdoor fireplace on my deck. So I'd move this wall back a little bit further, I'm going to move this window over, I'm going to extend this wall out, I'm going to pull my deck line over here and probably take it back to make it bigger. Then on this wall here I'm going to add my fireplace, which will be an indoor, outdoor fireplace."

It's from this same screen that KSN's Dream House for the Cure is created, and hopefully will impact the lives of many.

"It's worked a little bit differently because I'm not starting with anything that we have. Within a week, I should have the main floor of our new dream house on the computer."

In the coming months, we'll show you every step as the dozens of companies pitch in with supplies and expertise to help make the KSN Dream House for the Cure a reality.

The rest of this week we're going to introduce you to a few of the companies and people who have jumped at the chance to build the KSN Dream House for the Cure.

Coming up this week:

This home is going to be a "green" home. It will have the latest environmental technology from the floors to the roof and more. Star lumber has the experts on building a green home and we'll show you how they plan to make this a home for the 21st century Wednesday.

Of course this amazing home is going to have some amazing features. From a custom theater room to the sound system that's connected throughout the house, it'll be the most technologically advanced house you've ever seen. We'll go through that Thursday.

And Friday, we'll show you the reason why KSN and more than 30 other companies are taking on this amazing project. We'll talk to breast cancer survivors and show you how the proceeds from the KSN Dream House for the Cure can change lives.

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