Essential Tips When Building Your Dream Custom Home

Most of the information online about custom home builds and designs is unnecessarily complicated. It speaks of budgeting, hiring a great architect, avoiding delays, getting permits, and many more technical aspects of the process. Sure, all that is important, but there’s a lot more no one warns you about.

The following sections go through some of the more unspoken details. These are the things people only realize when it is too late. If you are building a custom home and want to avoid the “I wish someone had told me” moments, this one’s for you.

Design Keeping Your Habits in Mind

Most people design their homes based on a picture they once saw on Instagram. But have you ever paid any thought to how you actually live?

Do you leave your keys on the kitchen counter every day? Consider designing a dedicated drop zone by the entrance.

Do you hate folding laundry? Add a drying cabinet or laundry folding station near your bedroom.

Love late-night snacking? Place a mini-fridge near the master suite.

Form is beautiful. But function? It determines the way you live, and that is where true luxury lies.

Design Like You’ll Age Here

Even if you are young now, your knees and lifestyle are going to thank you later. Your dream home is supposed to grow with you, not against you.

We suggest small additions such as a wider staircase, accessibility add-ons, bedrooms with attached baths, and blockings in the walls for future grab bars.

Plan the Bottlenecks

Imagine five people needing the bathroom at once or getting ready for work while your kids eat breakfast. Now walk through your floor plan all over again. Where are the bottlenecks supposed to happen during the morning traffic.

Consider adding a second sink in the main bathroom. To ensure everyone stays out of each other’s way as much as possible, install a coffee bar or toaster nook away from the cooking zone. You could also invest in pocket office spaces for rushed Zoom calls.

Pick a Storage Style

This is going to decide everything. If you are a visual organizer and must see things in order to use them, your storage style will differ widely from someone who likes things out of sight.

This will affect your pantry design (open shelving vs. deep drawers), bathroom storage (mirror cabinets vs. baskets), closet layouts (double hanging vs. display shelving), and much more.

Be Future-Oriented

A major rookie mistake first-time custom homeowners make is that they approve a completely or partially impractical design for their home. When they lay down the plan with their architect and designer, they have larger-than-life concepts like a swimming pool in the basement or two different home theatres, but perhaps they miss out on the necessities of daily life like a sizable laundry room. 

Whenever customizing your home design, make a detailed list of the needs of your daily life and then add hobbies, interests, and passions into the mix. Working from priorities to wants can ensure you are not leaving behind a design element of great importance simply because you are creating a dream home from the movies. 

When working on your home design, ask questions pertaining to the future, such as how many children or pets, you are likely to have or whether or not your parents will move in with you once they are much older. Bringing the future into perspective allows you to make changes before the actual construction starts since making additions, later on, is costly and problematic. 

Big Rocks and Small Rocks

A famous strategy for managing stress is to visualize big rocks as major priorities and small rocks as less important things. When you are building a custom home, you will already be dealing with immense costs that far surpass the building of a suburban home for example.

In this case, you will undoubtedly need to prioritize certain design concepts over others, and compromise within your own vision is essential to preserve finances. Write down the design elements you simply cannot do without like a gym room or a large, open kitchen and then make a ‘B’ list that includes concepts you’d like, but would be willing to leave if they cause you to massively exceed your set budget. 

Big rocks can be ideological in nature as well, such as wanting your custom home to be as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible or powered partially by solar power. Once you have decided your priorities, it will be much easier to direct the designer and the architect on how to incorporate your preferences into a workable model. 

A Play on Light

Never underestimate the colossal role light plays in any home, regardless of climate and reigning weather conditions. Sunlight boosts serotonin and dopamine receptors and having as much natural light as you can in the home brings many significant advantages. In your custom home design, make sure you have an allowance for large windows and other inlets where light can come in such as skylights.

Research has shown that depressed individuals can benefit greatly from exposure to sunlight, so having streams of natural light in your home can impart a serene, relaxing, warm and cozy vibe. 

Apart from windows, lighting fixtures and options in your custom home will contribute to the atmosphere and vibe during the evening and nighttime. If you want a master chandelier in the foyer, it is a detail you will need to add to the original plan as such a design element will require the ceiling to be at a certain height.

In a custom home every last detail is measured and approved as the designer and architect are not working off a set precedent or model and the home is meant to be quite unique. 

The Flow & Layout

Your home needs to have a practical flow to it which can sometimes be lost in homes that are customized to a high degree. The flow needs to match the requirements of each of the inhabitants.

Perhaps a separate writing cabin or music studio needs to be made on the same property, but for obvious reasons, it will be kept away from the main crowded living area or the front of the house.

Similarly, the bedrooms (particularly the master bedroom) will be situated far from the main living spaces in the house. 

Never approve of a floorplan in the early stages of designing simply on aesthetic grounds, but always think about form and function. Certain traditions such as a big Sunday dinner might be important to you and your family, so make sure your kitchen is large and airy along with cozy with plenty of space for seating and feasting.

When in doubt an open plan always goes down well since it makes use of higher ceilings and wide, open spaces which can then be utilized in a number of different ways. Open plan designs are amazing for smaller custom homes as well since they give the illusion of more space.

Ready to Move In?

Your custom home design is ready when you look at the floor plan and feel ready and excited enough to move in immediately! If you keep your plan as well as your preferences front and center, your custom home will definitely feel like something right out of your dreams!

Need help designing your custom home? Reach out to expert custom home builders in West Virginia who can help you save time as well as work with your vision for the best outcome.