Here at Homes by Morning Star, we know that building a new home can be extremely overwhelming, and when you’re building a custom home from scratch it’s downright scary. Although the idea and process can become a bit overwhelming, we’re here to help. Too often we see people give up on their dream home before they even get started! In order to help take away some of the confusion we’ve started our ‘Building a Quality Home tips and Tricks’ series to try to inform anyone interested in starting a new custom home project about some of the nuances of home design.
This week we’ll be focusing on the top four mistakes to avoid when you’re starting your new home project;
- Focusing on a floor plan – When you decide to work with a custom home builder, you’re not buying a floor plan, you’re partnering with a firm. Based on your needs and budgets the firm will design a home that fits you best. A good floor plan is worth it’s weight in gold, but if you become to focused on only the floor plan it can be easy to lose sight of the rest of the project.
- Choosing the Lowest Bid – Of course you want to save money where you can when you’re building a custom home from scratch. However choosing your builder based solely on the lowest bid is the worst mistake you can make. Choosing to go with the bid often ends in disaster for the consumer. Check back for a post featuring Choosing a Builder where I will go over questions to ask potential candidates and help you find the perfect builder.
- Not allowing enough time – It’s important to realize that when you decide to build your own custom home you’re committing both money and time into the process. To get your perfect home, you can’t simply hand the project off to others. You need to be involved in the process. Between work, family, friends, hobbies and everything in between it can be difficult to find time to plan your future home. But if you’re serious about wanting your dream home, you need to make the time to ensure that your home is exactly the way you want it. It’s you’re dream home after all, isn’t it worth taking the time to ensure that it’s designed and built exactly the way you want it?
- Settling on a used house – If you’re interested in building your own custom home, you’ve likely already looked into purchasing one of the used homes that are currently on the market and have found the price difference appealing. Sure the used home is attractive, it’s already built, and it will cost less than building a custom home from scratch. But that’s only what’s on the surface. You need to keep in mind that when you buy a used home, you’re likely to ‘invest’ thousands in repairs and remodeling projects to get the home ‘nearly’ the way you want, but in the end you’ll still be living in someone else’s dream home, and will likely have spent more money on the used home in the long run than you would have if you had spent more upfront on your own dream home.
This was only one building a quality home tip. If you’d like to read more tips check back at our blog every now and then, or if you want all of the info NOW, sign up for our FREE planning guide where you can find this information and more! Secrets to Building a Quality Custom Home.