Brandon and I started thinking through our house design in the fall of 2021. That’s a long time to be dreaming up some house plans! While there were some elements filtered out in the beginning (spiral staircase, second story, etc), we’ve been pretty steady in what we want in our new build. However, I feel like in the past few months we’ve changed up our ideas on a few details as we went further into our financial journey.
Below I’ll be going over 5 things that have changed in our house plans. It should be obvious that there could be more changes down the road, and we may even flip flop on these again! We welcome changing our mind during the dreaming/preparing stage, but once we have those plans locked in, we will do our best to avoid change orders!
flooring we’ll like forever ➡️ flooring we’ll like for the next 5-10 years
We were fully in the camp of wanting to get our flooring right at build time for quite some time. While we still agree that we want to make sure our main flooring is what we want, we’ve decided to be more flexible in areas such as secondary bathrooms.
We’re considering doing an LVT click/lock flooring in the bathroom spaces and replace with tile down the road. Tile itself isn’t too expensive, but I personally would not want to pay for the $$$ labor to install a tile I don’t love and then later pay for the $$$ labor to remove it.
We actually ordered some great LVT samples from Tilebar like this one:
But since we wanted to try installing flooring in our tiny bathroom we have now, we didn’t want to pay for the $99 flat fee for shipping. Instead, we placed an order for this tile through our town’s Akin Design Center. If installation goes well, perhaps we could install this style of flooring ourselves (since it’s just click and lock) in the new house’s bathrooms!
By the way, budget isn’t the only reason that we want to do a more intermediate flooring solution in the non-primary bathrooms. Really I just don’t want to have the added stress of designing all of these bathrooms at once and regret any expensive decisions made!
modern cottage exterior ➡️ crisp, clean exterior
Now here’s an area that has changed a lot over time! I think initially we wanted a fully modern look, but then we switched to something like a modern cottage. While we still love this look, there were a lot of elements that weren’t translating into our house plan very well. For instance, most of these homes are two stories without a front facing garage. Trying to make our ranch with a large front facing garage look like a modern cottage was like putting a square through a round hole!
We were also looking at a big price tag with stone and brick that we’d prefer to put inside the home. Our house exterior today is muddy brown, so we loved the idea of seeing a crisp white house at the end of our lane. Artic White James Hardie siding might be our answer! Hardie siding is known as nice looking and long lasting. I think we could see about having horizontal for the main portion of the house and vertical in the gabled sections of the home.
I actually prefer white windows with an all white exterior, so this decision will end up saving us the slightly higher price tag for black windows, too.
marble backsplash ➡️ laminate backsplash
Originally we were going to do a dark quartz, laminate, or granite on our back kitchen counter and then a marble slab backsplash (as seen below):
When I was adding up how much extra this would cost us, I decided to render just an extended backsplash of our countertop material in SketchUp. I actually really liked it!
Plus, we found a laminate option that should look very nice on our perimeter countertop. I really like the sample we have of this, and it would look so good with the other materials in the space. If we decide it doesn’t wear well, we could always save up to replace it later. But I think we’ll be very happy with it, as we really don’t have complaints about our current laminate countertops besides them being green!
no tub ➡️ tub ➡️ no tub!
We started off not having a tub, maybe because of space reasons. Then we created a monster sized bathroom in our plan with a GORGEOUS tub moment. It was a beautiful corner tub with curtains.
Now we have no tub since it didn’t fit well in our bathroom. I think this is the right decision because we hardly use the two tubs we have in this house. If we really want a bath, we can use a different bathroom.
cooktop/wall oven ➡️ range
I’ve always loved the look of a cooktop and wall ovens were appealing for keeping pets and kids away when taking something out of the oven. However the more we thought about it, we didn’t want our oven right against a wall (and near a doorway) and that was the main place it made sense to put one.
Instead we’re thinking of a 36 inch range which should give us some more cooktop space (when we make black bean burgers and homemade wedges, it gets a little crowded). My preference would be an electric range, but they don’t make many of those that are 36 inches wide. Although the idea of cooking on a gas range kind of scares me with the little flame, I’m sure I’d get the hang of it!
Alright, those are all of our recent flip flops! Hopefully soon we’ll have real decisions happening with the builder. When that time comes, we’ll be ready!
Thank you for reading my post!
Davien
fluted wood & marble 
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