Photo Credit for all pictures in this post // CVH360.com
Today I’m talking about the 5 best decisions we made while building our house. There are SO many decisions when you are building. I know everyone says to prepare for that when you are considering build a house but it’s absolutely the truth! If you’re at all type A, like me, it’s hard not to agonizing over EVERY SINGLE ONE. And when you factor budget in, it can be overwhelming!
Just like everything else there are give and takes when building a house so it’s important to figure out what your non negotiables are and what things you really want! Luckily Alex and I agreed on most of those things so we had a good vision of what we was important to us in the house.
After living in our house for just over 2 months, here are the best 5 decisions we made while building!
- Finish planned unfinished space // When our house was designed by our builder, the 5th bedroom and 4th bathroom were unfinished spaces that could be finished later on down the road and used as storage for now. I was all about having that massive storage space! However, I wanted to rough in the plumbing in the bathroom so that it would be easier for us to finish when we wanted to. Unfortunately, the town would only allow us to either not finish it at all or completely finish it. We decided to completely finish the space and it was definitely worth it! The cost to finish a space while building is so much cheaper than after the fact. I think we paid around $80/sq ft (which will totally depend on where you live) to finish it during building but it would probably cost us over $200/sq ft to finish it later. We’re currently using the space as an office for Alex which is great because we each get our own offices! Later if we have more kids we might convert it to a playroom/guest room.
- Front porch gate // Charleston life is all about front porch living! We have double front porches (upper and lower) and the lake that we live on is actually in front of our house (we have almost always seen the lakes be in the backyard). Since we’re coming from New Jersey, we actually weren’t sure how much we would use our front porch (not really so much of a thing in the Northeast), but the sun rises over the lake and the view is great, so we figured we would love it in the mornings. With a dog and little kids, we came up with the idea to put a gate on the front porch so that we didn’t have to worry about either of them running off. I literally cannot stress how much we have used it already and love it!! Our dog loves to lay in the sun so sometimes he just lays on the porch all morning and we don’t have to worry about him getting loose (he’s a runner)!
- Trexs decking // The standard porch decking that came with our house was pressure treated pine. To be honest, Alex and I are pretty lazy especially when it comes to maintenance. So, we knew we weren’t going to want to clean/stain the wood regularly. We looked into putting faux wood tile on our back porch, but it was ridiculously expensive, so we went with our second option – trexs! Our trexs color is Spiced Rum and it really does look like real wood – without all the work!
- Laundry Room Redesign // Our building plans had two lockers in our laundry room/mud room and a refrigerator, but no sink. I was pretty set on having a sink in the laundry room, so we swapped the refrigerator out, added a sink (and cabinets above) and made an entire wall of lockers (5 in total). We have already used the sink so many times – I can’t imagine not having it there! We are planning on putting an extra refrigerator in our garage, which seems like a better use of space to me, rather than taking up a large chunk of our mudroom. I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t cheap to add all of the cabinets/wood work for the lockers, but we worked with our designer to come up with a plan that didn’t completely blow the budget. Also, we painted the cabinets a blue gray (the same as our kitchen island) and it really gives the room some interest!
- Oversized Slider to Back Porch // Our house plans had French doors leading from our family room to our screen in porch. Since the weather is so great in Charleston 85% of the year, we knew we were going to want to leave those doors open a lot of the time (especially since we don’t need to worry about bugs with the screened in porch!). We wanted to be able to open the doors as wide as possible, so we had oversized sliders put in instead of the French doors. We haven’t been in the house for warm weather yet but we are so excited to use these doors in the spring (especially once our pool is finished!).
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