Paula Murphy Architect - Practising as an architect for 30 years

Paula M Murphy is a registered Architect in private practice specialising in Domestic, Medical, facilities/practices, Interior Architecture, Planning Appeal, matters Conservation, in Private Practice for 18 years. She also deals with Construction disputes for the last 25 years. She believes that clients receive the best service if they engage from inception to completion of the project. She administers the building contract on behalf of the client and oversees the scheduling of the payments under the terms of an RIAI Contract.

Her work can be viewed on her website and on Houzz.ie under Find an Architect in Tipperary. She is an occasional contributor to the Sunday Independent Architects Clinic providing solutions to readers' design queries and also contributes to the RIAI House and Design Magazine. 

Paula states: Clients tend to be very anxious to proceed quickly when they have finally made the decision to renovate/extend /build, however in order to control costs and seek to obtain the best result, it is critical that sufficient time is spent teasing out the issues with the client prior to sending the project out for pricing. This helps to reduce, if not, eliminate costly on site changes.

Another area that it is important to budget for and at least have a sketch proposal for what you want long term is the landscape plan. It might prove economical to do certain areas of this work when you have the builder on site. In addition you might consider planting saplings, early, even before the build commences, so that when you are moving in a certain amount of landscape has taken hold. 

The big ticket items on projects are windows, kitchen, sanitary ware and, (especially given the energy crisis) your chosen method of heating. These items should be tied down before the build commences as the cost difference between the various choices can be considerable. If these are carefully selected in advance, when the pressure is off, I find they rarely change to any great degree during the site phase. 

You need to ensure that your building professional can sign off the Certificates in relation to planning and building control, as appropriate so that when you come to sell the property all these are in order. An RIAI registered Architect can provide these where they were involved in the build. 

Paula is located at The Studio, Parkstown, Horse and Jockey Co Tipperary E 41 XE18 and can be contacted on 050444315 / 086 8123248

Email: paulamarymurphy@hotmail.com 

Website: www.paulamurphy.ie / houzz.ie

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