It’s happening – our first real builder update!

After years of waiting and planning, the time has finally come to work with the builder! We met with them November 29th, and we’ve already received preliminary plans from their draftsperson. It was crazy to see the plans we dreamed up laid out in a professional way with technical information such as a door/window schedule. So far the builder has mentioned that with the high end aesthetic we show in our inspiration pictures/renders, we may be landing in the 20-40% over budget range. LOL! I’m not too surprised because we have been dreaming big!

Our first task was to take a look at the preliminary plans and see what changes we’d make. The main floor was pretty spot on with just a few changes, which was very impressive considering how well they were able to match my SketchUp render in a short period of time. All changes were pretty minor, with the main comments just being around door placement, guest bathroom configuration, and adding windows to the primary bath. Due to not knowing how the main floor would pan out (we have no credentials in this field), we held off on giving any input on the lower level/basement in case there were drastic changes with the size or shape of the house’s footprint. The draftsperson ran with the basement design giving it a nice wet bar, one and a half bathrooms, and two big bedrooms. While this looked awesome and would work nice for someone else, we weren’t looking for as much recreational space down there, so we did send back revisions asking for more bedrooms and removing the wet bar.

Last week, the weather was great, so we were able to go on a walk to think through the house and noodle on how we’d tackle the higher estimate and prioritize what’s important to us. We brought up the idea of finishing the basement at a later time to help keep costs down. The boys would go back to sharing a bedroom (in our would be fitness room) and the baby would have her own nursery. We’d still find a way to create a hangout downstairs for the boys and their friends since we need a living room TV that doesn’t know what YouTube is. The boys and our baby would have a full bathroom right by their rooms, so it’d already be an upgrade from our current home where everyone shares a shower.

Overall this decision has so many benefits. For one, it would definitely move us closer to our budget which lines us up to pay off the house within four years of finishing the build. It allows us to focus on just furnishing a couple spaces in the main level like the living and dining room versus worrying about buying more bed frames/mattresses for additional bedrooms. Once we have the new house paid off, we can work to save cash for our basement and finish it in phases as we fund the next steps. Finally, it allows us to really slow down on the design for the lower level and make it something we love instead of only thinking of cost saving options. With it being a few years away, it’ll be fun to have another area of our home I can experiment with as I learn and grow in my interior design hobby.

Now, our basement is going to be our main area where we cut costs. We’ve also decided that while most areas of the main floor we want to get right at build time, we are totally fine just putting a utility sink, washer, and dryer in the laundry room. That will be more than enough to get us by for a few years, and if we really don’t like it, we could save up on the side and prioritize a laundry room upgrade before the basement. We also added a revision to the preliminary plans to exclude mudroom cabinetry/lockers as we’ll just use coat hooks and a bench until we decide otherwise.

I’ll reiterate that we’re still waiting on the real estimate which will then need more detail to become actual hard set costs, but I feel so much better about our home design now that we’ve made some decisions on how to keep our dream home from hindering our other goals. While we’re so excited to build this home, we want to make sure it never gets taken away by building it within our budget and working to own it outright as soon as we can. We want to try renovating homes in a way that improves our community by just sprucing up the houses and makes them not only the affordable option, but a house you’re excited to move into! Someday I’d also love to build a small cottage that can be used for rental, my own family visiting, or even a romantic getaway. If I didn’t have all those other things I wanted to do, it’d definitely make it difficult to keep our budget front of mind while designing/building our dream house!

It felt so good to finally have a builder update! We anticipate having many more updates in the months to follow, and I’m looking forward to sharing the process of working with a custom home builder!

Thanks for reading!

Davien