Dodging Dream Home Disasters: 6 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Dream Home
Watching your dream home come to life is a gratifying experience. From pouring the foundation to painting drywall, you’ll be able to oversee and add your personal touch to every stage of the building process.
However, if you’re a first-time home builder, you may feel overwhelmed by the number of choices and decisions you need to make along the way. While you’re bound to make a few mistakes, major missteps will drain your wallet and delay your building timeline. To stay on track and within your budget, here are six mistakes you should avoid while constructing your dream home.
Hiring amateurs or taking a DIY approach come move-in day
When the contractors have all left, and the sound of hammering fades, the hard work isn’t over yet. Moving into your home is an essential part of the process and comes with its own set of potential problems. Finding a reputable moving company can be a challenge, and it’s easy to find hundreds of stories online about experiences with illegitimate moving businesses.
When you’re conducting your research, focus on companies that are appropriately licensed and insured. If your potential movers are demanding an upfront payment or charge you based on cubic feet instead of by weight, you’ve likely stumbled into a scam. If you’re hiring an auto shipping company, it’s also wise to be on the lookout for fraud. Legitimate car transportation businesses will always provide you with a detailed contract, and they will be readily accessible by phone or via online live chat. Never pay for services via wire transfer, and stay wary of auto shipping companies that don’t offer free quotes.
Ignoring resale value
As you’re building your dream home, you’re probably not thinking about selling it. However, there’s always the possibility of change around every corner. Your company may ask you to transfer to a new office, or maybe you end up wanting to be closer to family. Whatever the reason is, you should never rule out the chance that you may move in the future.
Making extremely personalized design choices or opting for a complicated floor plan can negatively impact your home’s resale value when it comes time to list your home on the market. While you don’t have to throw out all of your unique design ideas, stay within reasonable bounds when building your dream home.
Forgetting to take future needs into consideration
As time passes, your lifestyle and priorities will shift and change. Your home should be able to adapt to those changes. A major mistake many people make as they’re building a home is only considering their current situation. If you’re a newlywed moving into your first home with your significant other, you may want to consider making your home more family-friendly with extra bedrooms and bathrooms. If you’re planning to live in your home until after entering retirement, consider how accessible your home will be as you age.
Prioritizing desires over necessities
Building a home comes with a list of endless choices, from paint color to the type of blinds you want in your windows. It can be easy to become caught up in all of the personalization choices you can make, blowing your budget on your fantasy and ignoring necessities. Before you even bring pencil to blueprint paper, list out all of your needs to narrow down what your floor plan needs to look like. Prioritize those fundamental design aspects before including items on your list of dream home desires.
Ignoring the importance of space planning
Planning out the best use of space in every room of your house is essential to designing a home with the most efficient flow and adequate storage space. While you’re living in your home, you’re sure to accumulate personal belongings and items that eventually fill up your storage closets and even overflow into your garage. Take time to consider which rooms in your house need extra storage space and where you can add cabinets and shelving to avoid having too much dead space.
Rushing the process
As you begin designing and building your dream home, the excitement will become unbearable. Of course, you want to move in as soon as possible and start enjoying the sanctuary you’ve fantasized about your whole life. However, rushing the building process will only result in costly mistakes and easily avoidable missteps, no matter how experienced your contractors and designers are. After you’ve completed the design process and begun construction, it can be challenging to alter your build. Consider every aspect of your home down to the smallest detail, so you don’t have to spend extra money on renovations down the line.
The bottom line
Taking your dream home from sketches on graph paper to an architectural reality is a lengthy and involved process that will yield fulfilling results you can enjoy for years. Minimizing your mistakes along the way will only benefit you, so research thoroughly, don’t try to cut corners, and stay on top of every detail, no matter how small.
- by Matt Watts
