My husband loves to tell houseguests about me grouting our tile at nine months pregnant with our first baby. It would have saved us time and money in the long run. In some cases, we got lucky, but we definitely should have asked for referrals and reviews before doing business with our contractors. Looking back, we hadn’t done our homework and properly researched all of our contractors. He made off with the cash and we never saw or heard from him again. We hired a roofing contractor and handed over a huge deposit before he’d ever set foot on our property. Keep it in the forefront of your mind when designing and building a home. Planning for storage isn’t the most exciting part of the process, but it has a huge influence on your lifestyle and organization later on. I wish I’d known that storage is prime real estate in a home. But I’d bet that if you polled homeowners, most would say they’d rather have more storage space than, say, a deeper bathtub. Most of the attention goes to the master bath finishes and picking out cabinetry details. No one gets that excited to plan their storage spaces. Keep your resolve and get all of those little jobs done before your first night in the home. If you already have contractors there, it’s much easier to finish projects now than paying them to come back later. But I wish we’d finished everything before moving in since those last few items literally took years to complete afterward. Plans you had to finish the basement or landscape your backyard seem less important if they’re holding up your move-in date. This might seem like an obvious piece of advice, but when you near the end of a long build, you’re just ready to move in. We designed our home with “right now” in mind, but it would have been better if we’d had a 5- or 10-year perspective. Sure enough, however, we had three children over the space of 10 years, and things that worked for us as a child-free couple aren’t ideal now. It definitely showed when designing our home we could barely even imagine what life with kids would be like. Design for your future.Īt 21 and 25, my husband and I were anything but seasoned. When it comes to what to know when building a house, understanding that your ideal schedule may not pan out is at the top of the list. I wish I’d understood that the schedule was definitely subject to every contingency in the book. Bad weather, building issues, and scheduling contractors meant the timeline was out of our control. Of course, what I thought was a hard-and-fast schedule was really a loose guideline. Originally, however, our optimistic contractor gave us a tighter timeline, and we hoped to be done in nine months. Our build stretched over the course of a year. Here are 10 things you can learn from my experience in the hopes your build goes a little more smoothly. After a decade of living in our custom-built home, there are definitely a few things I wish I’d known back when we were building. Would I change the number of linen closets in my home? Absolutely. Would I change the experience? Of course not. When we started our new-home build, we were naive and had all the energy in the world, but it didn’t save us from some of the pitfalls of building a home. During the process, though – that was another story. Now, it’s a funny anecdote we bring up when talking with friends and family. That’s how my husband and I went from a pair of looky-loos to building a home over the course of a year. What started as a lazy Saturday afternoon looking at model homes soon turned into a full-scale commitment to building a house.
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