If you’re building a house from scratch, it can look however you want it to look. If you’re having a house built in an existing home community, some of your options might be limited so as to maintain the homogeny of the neighborhood, yet there are still often design changes and additions you can request. There are also things you’ll want to consider where you’re going to go through the process; here are 5 of them.
1. Make sure you find someone you can talk to easily. You might have to go through a few designers, but this is the second most important point you need to consider. You might have problems articulating your design beliefs, if you have many at all, and having someone you can talk to that might understand you will remove a lot of stress from your life.
2. Design the inside of the house first. The outside of your home is pretty much for everyone else; it’s the inside of your home that should be the most important to you because it’s where you’re going to be most of the time. How many bedrooms do you want? How large a space do you want for each room? How many bathrooms do you want, and do you want a master bathroom? If you want a hot tub, where do you want it?
3. Think about the internals of the design. This means things such as where appliances will go, whether you want stereo wiring built into the walls, ceiling fans, gas fireplaces and the like. It doesn’t do you much good to design a room for one purpose and find out you don’t have a place to put all the plugs you’d need to run everything. Thinking about where you’d like a gas fireplace, or where you’d like an island in your kitchen that’s going to have a sink attached to it impacts many other things within the house that you won’t see and might not have thought about.
4. Make sure your design is environmentally friendly. This isn’t necessarily to protect the environment, although that’s not bad to think about. It’s to help save you money in the long run. Things like skylights and windows facing east and west to help the sun warm your home, natural spaces to help airflow and thus keep your home cool in the summer are nice touches.
5. No matter what, make sure you get everything down on paper and signed. As Judge Judy says, if it’s not written and signed, it didn’t happen. There are too many horror stories from buyers who didn’t end up what they said was agreed upon.
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Mitch writes on real estate, finance, and many other things.