3 House Building Upgrades We Wouldn't Do Again

Happy Wednesday! Man, summer is flying by. Last week, I did a post on the best upgrades we put into our house (read it here!). This week, I’m talking about 3 upgrades we did but wouldn’t do again. Honestly, this was really hard because after looking at our upgrades, I would pretty much do everything again. I actually struggled to even come up with these 3 lol.

Every time you build a house there are, of course, things you would change. After living in our house for 6 months, one of my husband and my favorite conversations is “why didn’t we do this….” But, almost everything we talk about involves larger changes to the floor plan, not upgrades. I’m planning on doing another post on things we would have changed about our floor plan or at least considered. In terms of the upgrades we chose to the plan that we approved, there’s really not too much! Of course, if I had an unlimited budget, there may have been more upgrades I would have done (definitely would have been more), but there’s always a balance between what you want and what the budget allows when you’re building.

These are really just meant to be food for thought. When you’re building on a timeline, decisions often have to be made quickly which makes it hard to really determine how one thing will impact the overall budget.

Running the gas line to the grill // In theory, this seemed like a great idea. No more propane tanks! However, did you know that not all grills have direct gas line hookups? We didn’t! And guess what – our grill doesn’t have one! There is some super complicated way you can modify it to work with the gas line, but taking apart the grill doesn’t really sound like fun to us. Of course, we didn’t discover any of this until we bought a connector to go from the gas line to the grill and couldn’t figure out how to attach it. Now, down the line, we could get a new grill and use the gas line, but we hadn’t considered that extra cost when we decided to do this.

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Certain cabinet additions // All of our cabinets were completely custom. There was an original plan based on our floor plan, but we met with the cabinet design and could change anything we wanted. Let me tell you – custom cabinets are EXPENSIVE. And of course the things I really wanted were even more expensive! For example, drawers are more expensive than cabinets, built in organizers and dividers are extra, pull out drawers in cabinets are extra, etc. etc. We did end up going back and forth a few times on the cabinet plan once we saw the cost for our original request. Even though we did cut back on a lot to save money, I would try to cut back even more if I did it again. It’s really about prioritizing and a give and take. For example, I much prefer drawers to cabinets, so we added drawer stacks in both our kitchen and my office. Do I love them in our kitchen? Absolutely. Were they necessary in my office? Probably not. Are pull out drawers in our tall cabinet next to the oven really helpful? Yes. Did I need a divider in one of the island cabinets? Probably not.

Tongue and Groove ceilings on porches // To be honest, I’m a little iffy on this one. The ONLY reason I wouldn’t do this again is to save money. I think the look is amazing. It makes you house look so much more custom from the outside and first impressions are everything in real estate. I never even would have considered this but the home we walked through with our same floor plan prior to buying our lot had it and we fell in love immediately. Since then, I’ve noticed a lot of the new houses in our neighborhood have this type of ceiling on their front porch. We have these tongue and groove ceilings on both of our front porches, but not our back porch. It’s basically just stained shiplap on the ceiling (I talk a little more about it in this post on trim options because we also have this type of ceiling inside in our foyer!) If I needed to save money though, this is an easy place to cut something. I think a clean white ceiling (to match the outside trim color) would have looked great as well and I don’t think that would have taken anything away from the house.