5 Common Custom Home Building Mistakes & How To Fix Them
How to Fix 5 Common Custom Home Building Mistakes
When you’re investing your time, money, and emotions into creating your dream home, you want the journey to go as smoothly as possible. The fewer mishaps and mistakes, the less stress and heartache!
With years of experience helping clients build the perfect custom home for their families, we’ve put together this list of the 5 most common mistakes that are made during custom home builds—and how you can avoid them.
Poor overall planning
Before you even start your custom home building project be sure you’ve checked every box—take a look at our recent blog on planning a custom home build.
Have you taken unexpected delays into account when estimating your completion time and move-in date? If not, now's the time.
Make sure to take bad weather, labor days, and material shortages into account—these are all issues that can cause extensive delays to your project.
Double-check you have all your permits in order during the planning stage. It’s best to have a well-thought-out plan and a baseline schedule reflecting all permits required for construction. Your contractor should be able to assist you in making timely applications and tracking permits—ensuring they are received in time during the construction process. This will help prevent you from running into any trouble midway through your build. You’ll want to make sure all your documents are organized so that if you need them you can access them easily.
You probably already have a good vision of what features you want in your home, but get those finalized before starting your build. Both indoor and outdoor features can heavily influence your home’s layout and the progression of the build. Take your time to think about what features you want (and need). This is your home after all—you don’t want to make snap decisions under pressure, and end up regretting it later.
Overlooking lighting
Lighting plays an essential role in your home—it contributes to the general ambiance and the visibility of your space. Getting your lighting right is one of the most important steps to building the perfect home.
If you ignore your lighting needs, you can end up with dark spaces in your house that make living, working, and generally enjoying your home quite difficult.
Pro tip: choose natural light over artificial light when possible.
Natural light will make your home seem brighter and feel more inviting. Try to have a natural light source available for every room in your home.
Natural light has so many benefits, including:
Energy conservation—saving you money on your energy bills
Reduction in stress and anxiety
Improved vitamin D levels
Being better for your houseplants
Making your home feel bigger
Increasing the value of your home
If your home is well-designed then it’ll use a mix of different lighting styles and types, making it easy for you to illuminate your space regardless of what time of day it is.
Choosing the wrong team of contractors
It’s essential to choose the right team for your custom build. You want somebody on your team who’s trustworthy, has a reliable proven background, and who you feel is going to be easy to talk to when you have any issues or concerns about your home’s build.
Make sure you can communicate with them openly and honestly. This way you can get your ideas across and not have to worry about any miscommunication happening.
When you choose your builders, make sure you look into their previous work and read up on any of their testimonials. Any decent contractor will happily show you their credentials—if they don’t, you know something is up.
While price is important, the best price isn’t always the lowest price. If the lowest price contractor takes double the amount of time to complete a task, paying a slight premium to have the work done efficiently is worth it in the long run.
Sacrificing quality for cost
We’re going to stick with the price topic for this point.
Pay careful attention to material selections. A good contractor will be able to provide you a budget for selecting finish materials and should be able to provide you what cost impacts come with making those selections. A good mix of aesthetic appeal, maintenance considerations and price could give you the best of all worlds.
Your home deserves to be made with the best materials possible for your budget. Simply going for the least expensive option may yield disappointing results.
Think about the long-term benefits over the short-term costs.
Higher quality materials do tend to cost more, particularly with regard to initial investment, but higher quality materials do tend to last longer, which could translate to reduced product life cycle cost compared to cheaper materials.
Evaluate each scope and have an idea of where your preferences lie with regard to design emphasis. For example, in Florida’s climate, you may want to spend some additional budget on weatherproofing the building envelope to keep as much humidity out of your home as possible.
Flooring and appliances are important parts of your home you may not want to skimp on. The idea is to purchase the best value proposition given the expected life cycle, warranty, installation and cost. Considering these three items will allow you to make the best decisions with regard to selecting items for your home.
Losing control over your budget
Losing control over your budget is definitely one of the scariest things to happen while building your custom home. It’s incredibly common to go over budget slightly, but nobody wants to end up going bankrupt in the process of building their home!
Changes during the course of construction can quickly add up. The ideal process involves making as many selections as possible during the planning and design phase so that the entire build process can be planned out well ahead of time.
There will most likely be a need to make changes during construction, however, the idea of pre-planning is to minimize costly changes and protect the budget as much as possible.
Make all the decisions for your materials and furnishings during the planning stage so you won’t end up in the deep-end later on.
Always keep a close eye on your budget. If you do need to change something, make sure whatever your new decision is fits in with your budget or scale back on a different area to make room for your new choice.
You can see there’s a lot that can go wrong during a custom home build, but don’t worry, a little planning goes a long way.
Talking to a professional early in the process, even before you commit to a piece of land, can help you be more prepared and give you a better build-experience overall.
Book a call with Coastal today, and we’ll help you sort out everything you need for your custom home build.