1. What is my budget? Well to tell you the truth, my budget was 1/2 of my final cost. Things I had planned on doing when visualized and saw what was out there just wasn't attractive enough for me and If i am going to live in my home till I die, you bet i am going all the way.
2. How much square footage are you going to use?
3. What material are you going to use for the patio floor? This is important as bricks, pavers, natural stone including bluestone all vary in their price.
4. Know what types of fuel and or electric/cables you want to run as you will probably be digging trenches to lay gas, electric lines. You can never have too many conduits for electricity down the road. We plan on and know we want a pool so we ran conduit ahead of time. We also know we are having a pavilion so we ran electric to the corners and cat 6 cable.
5. Are you planning on having a firepit? If so decide what type of fuel source you will use, ignition type and the shape. You can go with natural gas or propane and you can have remote controlled pilot, manual switch or match.
6. Decide on if you will have an outdoor kitchen and the different components you will have. For example if you are thinking of putting a grill built in are you going to have infrared, rotisserie? and how big is your grille going to be? What material will you build the frame out of? Typically people use cinder blocks, pressure treated pine and steel with cutouts. The kitchen and appliances itself can run 12-20,000 alone as appliances are expensive and so is the labor .
7 Are you going to have special lighting in your patio? Low voltage LED lighting, smart lights are just some to consider.
8. What about smart outlets? I love smart outlets and installed at least 4 of them so I can control them from my android phone.
9. I don't know about you but my outdoor kitchen is going to have seating for 5 at the bar and an outdoor HDTV LED for watching games and more. I will run HDMI over CAT 6. Some of this may seem like overkill but as I said, if you do it, do it right.
10. Structures. Are you planning on having some shade? Perhaps you want a pergola or pavilion. Pavilion have more in terms of covering and keeping from the elements.
11. Sound: sound is critical especially when entertaining and you want to be able to control the music from your phone as well as the volume. Check out my videos on Zoned Audio system and the bose outdoor speakers.
