Buying a new home is an exciting experience, but working with home builders to design the perfect home is unmatched. While you can find a home that almost embodies your hopes and dreams, there is not preexisting home that meets everything you hoped and dreamed for in you future home. On the other hand, your home builders can create a house that is custom-tailored to match your exact needs and wants.
On the third hand, working with home builders to create your own house can be a less than perfect experience, if you choose the wrong home builders or make one of the common mistakes we’re about to tell you about. If you are planning to build a home in the near future, pay attention to our list of mistakes you should avoid:
Four Common Mistakes People Make While Building Their Own Home
- MISTAKE: Choosing your HVAC system as an afterthought.
Your HVAC system is going to be the greatest energy user in your home. The design of your homes will have a huge impact on the efficiency of your HVAC system, and the lifespan you get out of it. Your home designs should take into account getting the most efficiency out of your HVAC system. This will save you hundreds on your energy bills, and keep you comfortable when you’re living it your home. After all, the production home building process isn’t just about achieving a home that belongs in a magazine, you want to create a home that can be lived in as well.
If your HVAC system is an afterthought, at best end up with a home that costs a fortune to cool or never feels comfortable. In some occasions it can be much worse: If your HVAC system collect moisture improperly, it can lead to mold growth that is hazardous to the health of the people in you home. It can also cause rot that compromises the integrity of the home you worked so hard to build to begin with. - MISTAKE: Planning the space poorly.
Unless you’re building a mansion that you don’t need to use, you want to get the most use out of every inch of your home. If you just throw a room here and a room there while designing your home, the result will feel much smaller than it needs to, since you won’t get the functionality that you need from your home. It can be very frustrating to live in a home that was poorly planned out.
While designing your home, take the time to think about the functionality you want from it. Having plenty of storage is important, but only in the right places. For example, you might not need an over-sized walk-in closet in the master bedroom (or maybe you do; only you can decide that) but having a usable closet in the master bedroom and then a more spacious bathroom might be a better use of the space. You’ll want to make sure you have one closet in every bedroom and one in the living area, but there is no need to have so much closet space that it takes away from the living space, or it makes it easy to collect clutter you don’t need. - MISTAKE: Not planning the entire project from the beginning.
Before you ever jump in to building your own home, you need to consider your budget, the time frames, and each step of the project. If you don’t have an idea of how much you can spend from beginning to end on your home, it can be easy to get carried away with the fixtures in the bathrooms, and then run out of money before your home has windows. Budget planning is one of the most critical parts of building a home, and one of the biggest factors you want to make sure your home builder will help you with. - MISTAKE: Building a home you can’t grow into.
Be forward thinking with your home design. Are you going to have children in the next few years? Are members of your household going to be moving away in the near future? Maybe your dream is to work from home eventually and you’ll need office space. These are factors to consider in your initial plans so you don’t get boxed in.
