Building Your Home: Tips from a Mom Who Has Done it TWICE!

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home building, build own home, build your home, home building tips

Making the decision to build your home is both incredibly exciting and incredibly stressful!! There is a plethora of decisions to make and you’ll look at so many paint samples that your head will probably explode! But the best thing about building your home is getting to make all these decisions, and the worst part is having to compromise on your decisions for the sake of your budget. I’ve built a new home twice (SPOILED, I know!), and I’ve learned a few things along the way, so here are a few home building tips for you to consider.

1. Whenever possible, only pick a house plan that you’ve been able to walk through!

A home on paper will not give you as good of an understanding of the space, layout, and dimensions as walking through one will. As I was walking through showcase homes, I would go “wow, you can’t really fit a TV in here comfortably, it’s at too much of an angle.” Or “wow, this kitchen is really wide, it’s a lot of wasted space.” Or “who needs this large of a back entrance or foyer??? It’s totally unusable!” Just looking at a floor plan can’t give you that spatial understanding.

Both the homes we built were found through Showcase of Homes! It is the perfect way to see what you like and what you hate. Take notes and think hard about how you live now and how you WILL live in the future. Huge open railings upstairs?? Beautiful, but a safety hazard for toddlers! (My kids are climbers and they would seriously try walking on the railing like it’s a tightrope!)

Thinking about pets? Where are you going to put their water dish? Food dish? Litter Box? It seems like a good idea to have them built in, but it’s not actually that practical and it’s messy! Dogs drool, they are sloppy drinkers, they push their food bowls around as they eat, their paws get muddy, their hair gets everywhere, their nails scratch the floors…. I could go on. I have 4 pets, so the struggle is real!

Make sure you consider bed sizes, dresser sizes, couch layouts, tv placement, etc when you are setting up your house as well. I created to-scale paper furniture that I used on our house plans to make sure it would work with what I had.

Your garage is never big enough! When you have two cars in the garage, can you fully open the doors and not bang into your other vehicle? When you have kids, you are going to need to do this constantly. Plus, all the toys and bikes and playset! Extra storage in the garage is a MUST! You’ll be surprised how fast you fill it up!

2. Be meticulous about the details.

Make sure you and your builder are on the same page for every detail of the home, down to the light switches! For example, I went and picked out stone and grout for the outside of my home without my builder there. I made it explicitly clear to that company that my house was GRAY and I needed GRAY grout. I went to Canada on a family vacation and they put the stone on my house. My grout was NOT gray, it was brown. It looked TERRIBLE and resulted in a lot of back and forth on how they were going to fix it. It was something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but if my builder had been with me, she would have known and could have averted the situation.

I purchased every light fixture in my home and gave it to my electrician to install, but I never thought about bathroom fans. He put in the CHEAPEST bathroom fan there is, and I HATE THEM. They are LOUD, they rattle, and I probably would have picked one with a heater if it had been something I had thought about more explicitly. Make sure you get a QUIET bathroom fan! You’ll thank me later! (Actually, you won’t, because you won’t even notice it. You’re welcome!)

3. Plan your basement layout before building begins.

Even if you aren’t sure how long it’ll be until you’re able to finish your basement (which can easily cost $30k), you need to plan how you want your layout NOW. Your builder may have a suggested way, and that can help, but think about what you may want in the future.

For me, I wanted to have a huge soaking tub in our basement bathroom. It wouldn’t fit anywhere in our upstairs plan to begin with, but I also didn’t want it upstairs. I knew it was something that wouldn’t get a ton of use, so having it in the basement is perfect! I used the bump out area where our dining room is for the bathroom. It worked out perfectly for our layout, but it’s not something the builder had ever thought of. So, plan how you want your family room laid out, where the bedroom can go (you at least need an egress window to legally be a bedroom), and where the bathroom should go.
Another fun thing we added to our basement was a cedar closet! My husband uses it as his hunting closet, so it has lots of shelves and hanging. It’s the closet for our downstairs bedroom.

4. Get lots of samples and take them to your house to look at them!

The lighting of your house is different than the lighting in a store or someone else’s house, so you’ll want to get in your space to make final decisions. Formica companies will send you huge samples (like the size of a small notebook or a planner) for free! Your flooring company will likely give you samples of tile, carpet, and hardwood floors (some you keep, some you bring back) so that you can make your décor choices.

5. More Random Thoughts:

Do you like to sleep with your windows open? Make sure you get a double hung window for the bedrooms. Why? Because it is VERY obvious when a casement window is open, but not very obvious with a double hung window. Double hung windows can also be open when it’s raining, but casements can’t. Love a full clear view of your yard? Casement windows are what you want! Want to add extra style? Add a transom window! But not in your bedroom! I love the way they look over a bed, but you want it to be dark in your bedroom for optimal sleep! There’s no easy way to cover a transom window!!

White cabinets are popular, but are you ready to constantly clean them? It’s amazing how quick fingerprints, grease, and grime get on your cabinets, doors, and baseboards, so consider how much you love (or hate) to clean when picking colors!

In our first house, we had a regular fan encased in a beautiful cabinet. This time, we have our microwave over our stove with cabinets above it and the microwave has a built-in fan. I will never have the microwave style fan again! It spits so much grease onto my cabinets above, that it is a huge mess! It doesn’t come off easily either!

Compromising for your budget, a necessary evil of the home building process. The upgrades can be very attractive, but you need to keep your budget in mind! What can you live without and what is a MUST for you? It’s different for everyone! For us, we chose to forgo finishing the inside of our garage so we could have upgrades, like granite on our kitchen island and double shower heads in our tile shower, elsewhere. So always keep your budget in mind and find areas to save!

There will always be something that you wish you had done differently once you’ve been living in your house for a while. Accept it, move on, and make note of it in case you ever do it again!

What is a good tip someone has told you about building a home? Share it here!

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